ksuchor, Author at Conference on College Composition and Communication

CCCC 2019 Cultural Event

Join us for the CCCC 2019 Cultural Event on Friday, March 15. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.

The event will feature a live band and performances from Dr. Elaine Richardson and Christopher Henderson, music by DJ Todd Craig, dancing, and dinner and a cash bar.

Register today via the CCCC 2019 registration form. If you already registered for the convention, follow the unique URL in your registration confirmation email to add the CCCC Cultural Event or call customer service at 877-369-6283.

CCCC 2019: Saturday Workshops

Saturday Workshops

Saturday, March 16, 2019 – 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. (unless otherwise noted)

(SW.01) Community Writing Mentoring Workshop

Sponsored by: The Coalition for Community Writing

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Sponsored by the Coalition for Community Writing, experienced scholar-practitioners will provide resources and offer individualized mentorship and feedback on community-based writing projects.

Full description:

Background
Community Writing, a growing subfield within Rhetoric and Composition, studies and implements writing about, with, for, and by local and global communities. Popularized by genres such as service-learning, community-based research, community literacy, ethnography, community publishing, public writing, and advocacy and activist writing, community writing locates its work within the broad, historical traditions of rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and related disciplines.

In October 2017, the second Conference on Community Writing (CCW) took place at the University of Colorado Boulder, attracting 450 scholars, activists, and community members representing 48 states, three countries, 207 colleges, universities, and community organizations. This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.

The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing—as community organizers, students, teachers, and researchers—to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring. Attendees at the conference expressed a specific desire for mentorship from scholars, teachers, and activists with more experience in designing, implementing, sustaining, and evaluating community-based writing practices and the scholarship that emerges in concert with them. Additionally, at the conference, a group of leading scholars in the field began steps toward the creation of the Coalition for Community Writing.

This workshop responds to the desires expressed by the hundreds of attendees at the CCW conference for a hands-on opportunity for teachers, scholars, and community writers and organizers to dialogue with and receive feedback from senior scholars in community-based writing.

The Workshop

This proposed workshop, which will be sponsored by the new Coalition for Community Writing, will serve as the first mentorship event since the organization’s launch. The workshop will offer mentoring and feedback on community-based writing projects. It will be led by twelve scholars in rhetoric and composition, a diverse group of faculty who have deep experience with community projects and who have published many books and articles in community writing. Our group can offer advice related to project design, ethics of community work, ways to evaluate projects, questions related to scholarship, as well as job and tenure evaluation strategies.

This workshop will also showcase two mentorship projects associated with community writing. The first is a national online network of community writing practitioners through the Map of Community Writing, which we will launch at the workshop. The MCW will function as a mentorship and resource visualization tool for users to search and upload data to a national repository of community writing people, projects, and programs. The second project is a compilation of resources and mentorship opportunities, created by the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force over the last year in response to the threats against engaged scholars in the National Association of Scholars report and from other right-wing groups.

We invite participants at any level of experience with community-based writing who would like an opportunity for individual mentoring: those with early ideas and emerging projects, or those with long-term projects.

The workshop will open with each of the workshop facilitators giving a 3-minute account of their current research and the areas in which they can offer mentorship. We will then break into smaller groups of 5-6 at tables, with two facilitators at each table. Each participant will have the opportunity to share their research project, course, or program idea and receive feedback. Each participant can expect to present to the table for about 5 minutes and receive about 5-7 minutes of feedback, minimum. The timing will, of course, depend upon the number of attendees. While the senior scholar facilitators at the table will offer mentorship, others at the table may function as both mentor and mentee, based on experience. Participants will have the opportunity to switch tables once, providing them two sets of feedback and invaluable face-to-face communication with some of the leaders in the field of community writing.

In the last 45 minutes of the workshop, the Map of Community Writing (MCW)’s web developer will demonstrate the map’s capabilities and affordances and will guide participants in uploading their contact information and any materials they would like to share to the map. Finally, one of the workshop facilitators will share results and resources from the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force.

Afternoon Schedule, 1:00-4:30

1:00-1:30 Welcome and Facilitator Introductory Presentations
1:30-2:30 First Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:45 Second Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
3:45-4:10 Introduction to the Map of Community Writing and Participant Input of Information
4:10-4:25 Discussion of CCCC Strategic Action Task Force resources
4:25-4:30 Closing Remarks and Plan for Follow-up Mentoring Meeting at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2019

(SW.02) Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Come share your skills, pedagogies and practices in the cypher, to discuss Hip Hop in academia and the English composition classroom.

Full description:

Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

The facilitator is a pioneering B-Girl from the early eighties Hip Hop scene in Seattle Washington, but she is still active in the Hawai’i Hip Hop community today. She has taught B-Boy/Girl workshops at several local YMCAs, B-Girl Be (Minneapolis), Girl Fest Hawai’i, Girl Power Hawai’i and many more. She is also an adjunct lecturer, graduate assistant and English instructor who incorporates Hip Hop “ways of seeing” into her curriculum.

This workshop invites Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join a discourse about Hip Hop and its place in academia and English composition. The session includes empirical examples combined with a b-boy/girl dance lesson and a discussion or cypher for the co-performers.

2:00-3:00pm: In the first hour of this workshop the facilitator will demonstrate how to incorporate the five elements of Hip Hop (b-boying, emceein, djing, beatboxing, graffiti) into the college classroom with a focus on first year writing composition courses. Attendees will be asked to identify traditional literary forms that can be established within all the five elements such as repetition, format and style. We will then discuss how the five elements present a challenge to the Eurocentric epistemologies of argument and rhetoric.

3:00-4:00pm: The facilitator will then invite other Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join the cypher and show their skills in the sixth element: knowledge, which for our purpose will be a collaboration between academics and emic experiences within Hip Hop Kulture. If the cypher calls for it, the facilitator will incorporate an example of the heated exchange between KRS One and what he calls “rap historians” to ruminate over the questions of who has the authority to teach, preserve and document Hip Hop. I expect the facilitator and co-performers to engage in a serious discussion about how professors can draw from Hip Hop to reform education without the risk of appropriation. The facilitator is open, however, to follow the flow and go wherever this discourse may lead us.

4:00-5:00 Finally, as a b-girl practitioner and teacher, the facilitator will lead the co-performers in a dance class to teach the foundations of b-boying/girling. Other practitioners in the cypher are welcome to assist in the instruction. The lesson will last about thirty minutes and it will be followed by one final discussion question, which is to consider the relevance of implementing a similar type class in the English classroom and consider how it could be implemented. The session will conclude with the co-performers experiences, final words and final cypher.

What I expect the facilitator and the co-performers to leave with is our shared experiences in the cypher.

Please come prepared with your kicks and active clothing attire.

(SW.03) Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: Theatrical exercises to foster empathy, examine privilege and place, and train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and form.

Full description:

As theater makers who have each taught First Year Composition for over a decade, we see the dramatic arts as both a theoretical and practical way of thinking about writing pedagogy and difference. In particular, we are inspired by playwright Tony Kushner’s (1995) essay about the power performance has for training us to have empathy for The Other; by our lights, acting or directing or playwriting or even watching theater can encourage a kind of code-meshing (Canagarajah, 2006) in which the theater maker/watcher incorporates multiple codes, multiple languages, multiple performed selves. The empathetic practices inherent in theatrical performance thus give rise to the kind of anti-racist pedagogy Innoue (2015) argues for when he asks teachers to construct assessment ecologies where students and teachers are “connected in explicit ways” (p.289); theater demands connection, performance creates interdependent ethos. In addition to empathy-fostering exercises, workshop attendees will explore how theater practices can train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and formal invention. Which is to say that we position theater as part of the Teaching for Transfer movement (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Continuing the work we presented in Portland (2017’s CCCC), in which a series of short presentations were each followed by a drama-fueled pedagogical exercise, we will explore both the ways performance can become source text and the ways it can inform student decisions regarding form, mode, genre.

Act 1. “Removing Privilege from the Parlor: Hip Hop and the Burkean Oar”
Philosopher Kenneth Burke imagines a scenario where people are in a room having a conversation that continues indefinitely. Situating his reader as “you,” he famously writes “Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come in late…You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.” Burke’s metaphor encourages thinkers to contribute to an ongoing discourse; Burke can be an excellent tool for teaching students how to engage their own performative rhetoric in relation to that of others’. Yet what if the conversation is not accessible to all listeners? This workshop aims to remove privilege from Burke’s parlor by utilizing hip hop to teach students about their own potential “oar.” Diving into Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life,” Performer 1 will experiment with performative rhetoric and lead participants to consider their own relationship to this music. What aspects of the discourse can we access easily? What seems far away from our own experience? How does that inform our individual voice’s relationship to this material? Together, we will ponder difficulty in teaching this material to privileged students and the wonders of prompting some of those without privilege to feel more grounded in a discourse than their peers.

Act 2. “Performing for Transfer: Site Specific Theater as Metaphor and Method for Teaching Audience and Genre Awareness.”
Performer 2 will mine a play, The Sublet Experiment, as a case study for the relationships between performance, audience, genre, and space. The play, which had ran for over 6 months, was performed in a different New York City apartment every weekend. Interrogating Miwon Kwon’s (2002) binary of integration/intervention in site specific art, Performer 2 will work with participants on an inductive process students can use for mapping the ways in which the play’s performances were changed by their sites and by their audiences. The key concept this work introduces is Audience Closeness. How close is the audience to the performers, and how does that proximity change the choices the performers focus on? Workshop participants will experientially explore this concept by writing a short theory of audience awareness and then “acting” out that theory in front of other participants in three sitings: near-audience, circular-audience, and far-audience. These performative metaphors of interdependence will then be transferred back into skills and processes connected to audience awareness in writing (e.g. how can students alter their writing depending on how “close” to themselves they imagine their audience to be, etc.). In this way, the workshop will extend the Teaching for Transfer work of Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak (2014). We will examine the TFT terms of audience and rhetorical situation in the setting of site specific performances and help students imagine different physical settings of audience as a way of understanding formal choices such as diction, exposition, citation requirements, and other generic demands.

Act 3. “Memoirs of Place: The Geographies of the Self”
As we walk down the street we can acknowledge that other people have inhabited this space before us, but can we imagine what they were thinking? What their values and preoccupations were? What kept them up at night? One of the most intimate ways of understanding the performance of everyday life is through diaries and first-person accounts. This presentation and performance, based on a seminar taught at our home institution, will explore how a wide range of narratives can help give us multiple perspectives of a single place. Performer 3 will train participants to read diaries as performance: the New York of 1704 that greeted Sarah Kemble Knight, the perspective of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the debates of Wong Chin Foo (one of the first naturalized Chinese immigrants). These diaristic modes will be contrasted with “personal” place-centered performances that take the form of art, such as Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. Performer 3 will argue that a survey of first-person accounts provides students with many opportunities to engage in the varieties of lived experience from the bottom up. The workshop will then lead participants through a multi-modal exercise, in which they will create an online map that highlights places where they have experienced something important, as well as excerpts from the experiences of others (found in poems, diaries, photos). In this way, participants will create a “geography of the self,” a collaborative composition that is built in relation to what others have experienced. This workshop will be an enactment of performing and constructing place through an integration of the self and The Other.

(SW.04) Building and Running an Academic Journal: A Behind-the-Scenes Workshop in Independent Publishing

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This workshop demystifies journal editing to prepare new people to run established journals and support the creation of new journals.

Full description:

Building on the call to embody composing knowledges, this workshop offers performative/experiential learning for folks interested in explore how to create and manage academic journals, whether print-based, open access, hybrid, scholarly and/or pedagogical, or specialized (sometimes referred to as “niche”) journals. Working editors from Across the Disciplines, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and Literacy in Composition Studies will offer practical advice and purposeful activities based on our experiences as editors of diverse independent journals in rhetoric and composition. Our workshop is pitched to participants at various career stages: advanced graduate students, junior and midcareer faculty, as well as senior faculty seeking to contribute to the discipline in new ways. Our goal is to empower more field members to be actively involved in the knowledge-making process, encourage the creation of new publication venues that prioritize under-represented issues and voices, and to share the tools and practical know-how necessary to take an idea from conception to reality. Finally, as a supportive community of editors, we will continue the dialogue with participants after the workshop, offering advice, materials, and contacts, as appropriate. This workshop takes up the conference’s call to perform possibilities by opening up the often-closed world of journal editing with the goals of both preparing new people to participate in running already-established journals and supporting the creation of new journals.

Half-Day Workshop (1:30-5:00)

1:30-2:00: Introductions.
We will begin with a brief overview of the workshop facilitators’ experiences running and/or creating academic journals. Depending on the number of attendees, participants will introduce themselves and foreground their interests or purposes in this particular workshop (if attendance makes this untenable, participants will have similar opportunities within breakout sessions). We will then explain how the workshop will proceed, deriving our breakout session topics from the narrative we have shared about our own process and struggles. The introduction period will conclude with a few moments for participants to decide their “breakout menu” for the day.

2:00-2:50: Session One: What To Expect When Becoming an Editor

This session leads participants through activities designed to help them explore what to expect from journal editing. All participants will do this activity. Participants read and discuss material from journals, including mission statements, tables of contents, and editors’ introductions. The purpose is to explore what these artifacts demonstrate about audience, expectations for the journal, and the journal’s “persona.” Session activity will primarily be table-based, but the whole room will share discoveries in last 10 minutes.

2:50-3:00: Break

3:00-3:50: Breakout Session One
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.

A. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.

B. Infrastructural Technologies of Independent Journal Publishing: Participants will explore issues related to online publication, including the affordances and limitations of various platforms for academic publishing. Discussion of software for web and print layouts will also be considered. A special emphasis will be placed on open access (OA) technologies and CreativeCommons licensing schemes for authors and journals.

C. Stabilizing and Preserving Content: Print frontloaded the costs of publishing, but once the print object was created, stocking it on library shelves ensured its accessibility to scholars and preservation in the history of disciplinary knowledge. The free access to online publishing obscures the ephemeral nature of published digital content and shifts the costs of stable access and preservation to the back end, where editors must ensure a link to their authors’ work that is not reduced to “page not found.” This breakout establishes the importance of a strategic plan for ensuring scholarly content remains accessible to future readers and identifies the organizations and possibilities for doing so.

3:50-4:00: Break

4:00-4:50: Breakout Session Two
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.

A. Peer Review and the Role of the Editor: In this breakout session, participants will read reviewer letters and an initial draft of a subsequently published article (all with permission). Participants will strategize how to synthesize reviews, make decisions about submission, and decide on next steps. Discussion will address how to build a diverse group of reviewers who have the expertise necessary to fulfilling the journal’s publishing mission.

B. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.

C. Copyediting: Participants look at examples of manuscripts before they have undergone copyediting and develop a process for addressing the copyediting needs evident in the texts. This breakout foregrounds the ways that style decisions influence both the presentation of knowledge and larger practices in the field (citing student work, providing access to archival and other source material, etc.).

4:50-5:00: Whole-Group Discussion.
Participants reflect on workshop and articulate their next steps. For those interested in continuing dialogue, contact information may be shared.

(SW.05) Performing Curriculum in the Classroom: Designing Teaching for Transfer (TFT) Courses for Diverse Campuses

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: In this design workshop, we will create adaptations of the Teaching-for-Transfer curriculum to help students perform in multiple scenes–classes, co-curriculars, workplaces, and personal writing.

Full description:

From a pedagogical perspective this understanding of rhetoric and performance becomes a valuable way of acknowledging that texts, experiences, and writing are always given meaning according to time, place, and context, and that this requires an attentiveness to the way developing writers come to view and produce meaning through shared performances, by those who value the progressive possibilities of rhetoric and writing instruction.

—David Green

How to design writing coursessupporting transfer of writing knowledge and practice has garnered considerable attention in Composition and Rhetoric, with scholars researching it and designing courses to facilitate it. Performing this work in a half-day workshop, we will focus on two goals: (1) acquainting participants with the research on the Teaching for Transfer curriculum; and (2) assisting them in designing writing courses, appropriate for their campuses, using the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curricular design.

Articulated initially in _Writing across Contexts: Composition, Transfer, and Sites of Writing_, and now formally expanded through the 2017 CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored Writing Passport Project (http://writingacrosscontexts.blogspot.com/), the TFT curriculum is offered in first-year composition, upper-level writing, internships, and graduate TA preparation. In this CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored expansion, one of the goals has been to keep the integrity of the curriculum while adapting it appropriately for different purposes and student populations.

Each of the 8 locationshas a unique profile, and thus a unique situation for adapting the curriculum:

—University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College is an open-admissions, two-year, regional college in the UC system, with a highly diverse student population. The adaptations included a shift in readings and reductions in page lengths for assignments.

–Centralia College is a small, rural community college with open-admissions. The student population is predominantly first generation, with most students also working at least part-time. There are also numerous students above the age of 25 who have come to the college as part of worker-retraining or after a major life change. The adaptations for Centralia College were similar to those at Blue Ash, with an additional concern about time for reflection outside of class.

Bristol Community College, a mid-sized, urban, public comprehensive, two-year college, contains a population very much like that of Blue Ash and Centralia. In addition, Bristol has seen a remarkable growth in minority enrollment since the early 2000’s. Adaptations to the TFT curriculum included readings that speak to that diversity.

At UC Santa Cruz, an HSI, R1 university, student demographics have shifted significantly in the past five years, with a growing number of multilingual, international, and first-generation college students. Curricular adaptations have also included a shift in TFT readings, but to meet the campus GE outcomes of the course, the adapted curriculum included sustained inquiry with seven weeks devoted to the study of a self-selected topics over the course of a ten-week quarter.

The University of Denver, a private RU/H on the quarter system, is committed to interdisciplinarity, and students are encouraged to major in more than one area. This site focused on key terms and on the impact of visual mapping of key terms on the development of students’ theory of writing.

The University of Massachusetts Boston, a public, 4-year, majority-minority university in the Northeast, is home to a version of TFT adapted to an upper-level professional writing course that also serves as an introduction to the English major.

–At William Paterson University of New Jersey, a suburban, public 4-year HSI just outside New York City where students are often first generation college learners, more than 70% are commuters, and many are non-traditional students, the TFT curriculum was adapted to an upper level course in Technical Writing, with enrollment from across disciplines.

At Florida State University, a large public residential flagship with an increasingly diverse populationstudents often take internships: the question the research considered was how a condensed introduction to TFT might help these students succeed in their internships.

Given these diverse campuses, their sites of instruction, and the purpose of the TFT curriculumthe central question focusing this workshop is how adaptations of the TFT curriculum can help all students perform as writers in multiple scenes–including in classes, in co-curriculars, in the workplace, and in personal writing. Working toward that end, participants in the workshop will begin creating a TFT curriculum, or revise their existing curriculum with TFT concepts and practices, with feedback and reflection opportunities to continue after the conference.

Our schedule includes 8 segments.

–One: Setting the Scene
1:00

• Introduction of participants to each other
• Icebreaker activity
• Overview of workshop
• What participants want to know: collection of guiding questions from participants
• Exercise: What already works in your course/program?

–Two: Performing Transfer, Performing TFT
1:20

• Definition: transfer of writing knowledge and practice
• Implications of transfer research for classroom practice
• TFT: Key Terms, Systematic Reflection, Theory of Writing
• Key terms: the 8
• Systematic Reflection: definition/student examples
• Theory of Writing: definition/student examples
• Overview of assignments: major and minor examples, with readings

–Three: Remix: Bringing Together What Already Works with TFT
2:00

• Discussion at tables

–Four: Adapting TFT to Various Scenes
2:15

• Kinds of adaptations (e.g., readings)
• Community colleges: major adaptations
• Upper level writing: major adaptations
• Internships: major adaptations

–BREAK
2:45

–Five: Design/Curricular Drafting Session at Tables
3:00
● Basic writing
● FYC at 4-year schools
● FYC at 2-year schools
● Upper level writing
● Internships

–Six: Critical Friends Activity
4:00
● Promising aspects of the draft curriculum
● Aspects of the curriculum to be revised

–Seven: Notes to Self
4:30
• Remix: participant questions and TFT
• Next steps for individual curricular designs

–Eight: Closing Reflection/Staying Connected
4:50

(SW.06) Revision as REmix: Hip Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision

Level: 2-year

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work.

Full description:

In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work. By exploring the core elements of hip hop, participants will learn to guide a hip-hop infused lesson on revision for their students. To explore these core elements, participants will write, learn about hip hop sampling and practice revision. This interactive workshop incorporates elements of music, movement, and art.

Teaching students about hip hop sampling, helps connect the act of essay revision to an art form with which many students interact daily: the art of sampling. Getting students to realize how different samples are from the original makes clear the expectation for revision. The other elements I will employ while sharing this lesson are a “meta” presentation on how instructors might embrace hip hop culture overall. Through practicing additional elements throughout the course of workshop, attendees will gain a greater sense of how having a hip hop sensibility might impact their instruction beyond discussing hip hop sampling.

Inter-contextually, rhetorical theory itself encompasses oral and written communication. In a 1992 4Cs position paper, Casaregola argued eloquently that “generation by generation since the Renaissance and the development of print, moved further away from the origins of rhetoric origins that lie in the art of oral rhapsodic composing” (2). He furthers that “ the single most important aspect of ancient rhetoric was its oral performative nature–ancient rhetoric was an art of oral performance, even before it was derided by Plato or described by Aristotle” (4).

This presentation honors the performative nature of rhetoric by incorporating spoken word. The teachers will practice spoken word as a means to become more empowered educators through spoken word. Embodying spoken word will in turn help them to connect with the writing exercise in a performative manner. Though the main instructional component for students will be the discussion of sampling evident in the song clips shown, the main pedagogical component for attendees of the conference will be an embracing of hip hop culture through the use of practicing spoken word. The spoken word component is a means by which teachers may open themselves up to other components of hip hop, such as rap music. I will begin by showing a spoken word poem by Taylor Mali. Then, I will lead teacher-attendees through a series of prompts to create their own spoken word piece.

The questions that I will use for the writing prompt include the following:
1. When did you find your voice as an educator, and how did it impact your identity as both an educator and a person in the world?
2. How has (or might) this identity helped (or help) to increase access to the promise of education for Black and brown students?
3.Use the first letters of your name (first, last, or a combination) to write an acrostic poem that captures your responses to questions 1 & 2.

Then, I will share with them a lesson for teaching revision that I have found to work well with my students. This technique is performative in nature as well, as it involves a lesson on hip hop sampling. Once attendees engage with the lesson, they will then revise their work using the “sampling” technique introduced. I will play clips of songs that have later been sampled and have attendees note the differences between the two songs. This discussion about the practice of sampling will lead into a definition of revision. After this discussion, attendees will consider how they might write a new poem in the same way the hip hop song created a new song from sampling a previous musical arrangment. Teachers will have time to “sample” the first drafts of their poems by using the first draft written to create a new poem.

From there, we will prepare for an open mic session where they share their work. There will have been emphasis placed on “embodying” the poem, as an important component of spoken word. During the time allotted teachers attending the workshop will have the opportunity to perform the spoken word pieces that they create during the writing and revision process. Thus, the workshop will transform into a performative open mic space.

By using an open mic format, this session will flip the traditional conference model on its head by asking attendees to embody the teaching practice they are learning rather than sit down and soak up information. It is meant to be audience-oriented and performative. The teachers will be engaged as co-performers after they have revised their spoken word pieces. We will all gain knowledge of what helps us find voice as teachers.

We will also gain a new way of thinking about the connections between teaching composition and hip hop culture. Attendees will benefit by gaining a new sense of voice and a way to make marginalized centered in their classrooms.

This approach is inclusive and aimed at providing greater access to composition to students historically marginalized in these courses, including African-American and Latino students. Many of these students have to repeat composition. Teaching students to constructively revise their drafts is one way to ensure they become more successful writers. As an African-American female, hip hop educator, I feel that my own voice is underrepresented. I have been in the shoes of my students and am offering a way for my colleagues to uncover what makes those of us who are underrepresented in the academy feel more connected to the space.

(SW.07) DBLAC Writing Workshop

Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

Sponsored by: Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC)

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This Writing Workshop is an extension of DBLAC’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development. During this workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and writing activities.

Full description:

On the final Saturday of the conference, DBLAC will host a Writing Workshop for DBLAC members (graduate students and supporting faculty and community members).

DBLAC is an online and in-person network of Black-identified graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in fields related to the study of language. Our goal is to provide spaces and opportunities for our members that support their success. In doing so, we work diligently to uplift, support, and highlight the work of Black graduate students. You can read more about our mission and some of our work on our website: dblac.org.

Though many of our programs are tailored to Black graduate students, we are increasingly aware of the collective and universal need for community, especially in intellectual pursuits. That considered, we strive to share our methods and also to promote supportive communal interactions when possible. Our Writing Workshop is an extension of our organization’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development.

During the Writing Workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and work through individual projects and writing activities.

(SW.08) “Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst

Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance.

Full description:

This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance. Facilitators will highlight ways that Hip Hop is an important site of interrogation, especially in current times, and how youth and organizers worldwide are using hip-hop to re(construct), maintain, and negotiate their local situations and identities. A performance and lyrical deconstruction by a Hip Hop artist will be an interactive part of this workshop, as well as open times for discussion, questions and contributions from workshop participants.

In our Saturday Hiphop workshop, participants will:

interact with a live performance and Q&A session with Hiphop artists K. Freshh and Dr. Hollyhood
learn how Hip-hop inspired artists, activists, organizations, and coalition work can bring awareness to the need for criminal justice reform, ending state-sanctioned violence of unarmed people of color, as well as movements for environmental and educational justice
view protests, performances, and news video clips to generate dialogue to enhance approaches to Hiphop Education in Composition and Rhetoric courses, Secondary and Community College English courses, as well as community outreach
consider how Hiphop artists exhibit organic intellectual moves connected to social justice in their lyrics, words, interviews, music videos, performances, speeches, etc. and how the ideas these artists explore can prompt questions or actions to take with social issues, policies, etc. in the community of Pittsburgh
apply an organic intellectual approach from Hiphop to identify individuals or groups of people in communities and/or schools that may be forgotten about or marginalized in some ways and generate ways to make communities and/or schools inclusive and welcoming to all
discuss Hiphop intellectuals’ use of language to promote social justice and then identify how language is used/could be used in local (Pittsburgh) and state (PA) government to promote positive policies, laws, or any social issues

CCCC 2019: Wednesday All-Day Workshops

All-Day Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

(W.01) Performing Academic Writing in the Real World: Poverty, Disability, and Cultural Contexts in Basic Writing

Sponsored by: Council on Basic Writing (CBW)

Level: All

Cluster: Basic Writing

Abstract: This interactive workshop focuses on how writing and teaching are performed in complex student and institutional contexts.

Full description:

This workshop interrogates the “performance” of academic writing in real world contexts which require our students to perform student behavior and writing. The workshop responds to needs regarding how to best design writing experiences for increasingly diverse groups of students in our classrooms. Peter Adams, founder of ALP, asserts that Basic Writing Students have complicated lives: “Most of them are working, some full-time, some more than full-time and most of them are on financial aid because they come from impoverished backgrounds. Most of them are first generation to go to college.” The classroom is also always a locus for performative acts by both teachers and student. Brenda Jo Bruggermann and Debra A. Moddelmog contend that “The act of disclosing a historically abject identity in the classroom has had significant pedagogical consequences as well.[. . .]. It has also given the teacher a body, and not only a performing body but one that functions (or does not function) in physical [. . .] ways” (312). It is through these two lenses that CBW focuses its 2019 workshop.

The workshop will ask participants to write short vignettes based on real world situations encountered with Basic Writing students (multiple absences for missing the bus, dealing with child care issues, lack of funds, struggling with self-confidence, difficulty with self-advocacy). Throughout the day, these vignettes will be performed to mark transitions from one activity to another. We will return to these vignettes at the end of the day as we perform our roles as scholars of rhetoric and teachers of basic writing by continuing our work in moving toward a position statement on Basic Writing.

Speaker 1: “All Access, All In(clusive)” will allow participants to address elements of their writing classrooms (certain assignments, activities, rubrics, forms of interaction and engagement, expectations and outcomes articulated, etc.) from the outset using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) so that learning and interactions are optimally inclusive for all kinds of learners (disabled and temporarily able-bodied) This engaged and interactive talk, workshop and discussion about teaching writing based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) will talk aboutthe three triangulated networks of learning as they might be developed in your writing classroom: affective (the why); recognition (the what); strategic (the how).

Poster Session 1: Teaching Students how to Perform Science Writing: Rethinking STEM Writing as a Site of Basic Writing
This session will explain why science writing is a site of BW and teach participants how to rethink their approach to teaching the genre in the context of performance. We will base our presentation on a comprehensive pilot study that explored what are essential science writing knowledge gaps that exist in basic science writers (BSW) and hinder composition performance.

Poster Session 2: “Inside Our Classroom: Basic Writing Today” will highlight the work of scholars of color
The CBW has a long-standing commitment to racial justice and inclusivity. As such, we are designating a portion of our program to highlighting the work of scholars of color, with particular emphasis on newer scholars. We will do a call for participation in Fall 2018 via our CBW-listserv, our Facebook Community Page, and our blog.

Speaker 3: Teaching with Disabilities: How does a teachers’ disability impact a classroom? What is at stake for them in their teaching? In their position within an institution? What impact does visible or invisible disability have on student awareness of these subject-positions. This speaker will discuss moving from a position of temporarily able-bodied to disabled and offer strategies for this transition as well as crowd-sourcing from participants discussion around their own experiences.

Speakers 4 and 5: Interrogating and Challenging Deficit Models in Basic Writing

Participants will explore issues that commonly affect student performance beyond traditional academic measures. Such issues might include: outside work schedules, lateness or absences in class, economic hardships, time management, struggles with traditional academic genres, lack of clarity about expectations between previous schooling and college environment. Sometimes framed as deficits in BW Conversations, instead, we will apply specific problem-solving techniques to consider how affective issues impact our classrooms and how we can support student success by acknowledging, solving (where possible) and/or directing students to additional resources and support.

In addition to looking at student success and deficit thinking in terms of students, we also assert that it is important to examine how teacher-scholars use language to engage with students. Socio-linguistic examination of teacher talk and classroom discourses are essential to creating language practices which do not reinforce rhetorics of deficit. It is common to use terms like “non-cognitive” and “affect” to describe the nuanced and complex lives our students bring to the classroom, including deeply embodied intersections of race, class, gender, and disability. These speakers examine teachers’ experiences in the classroom and invite participants to examine their classroom language practices and how they might resist or support the rhetoric of deficit.

Workshop participants will brainstorm relevant issues from both the student and teacher perspective. Then, collectively will identify both traditional and innovative methods to support student success, resulting in a list of practices, resources, and references to share. These resources will be a tangible product of the workshop, publicly accessible.

Speaker 6: Toward a Position Statement on Basic Writing Studies During the 2017 and 2018 CBW workshop, participants worked through an intentional brainstorming processes to develop a draft of principles of basic writing studies. Building on that draft, the facilitators of this final session will lead workshop members through further discussion, debate, revisions, and ratification of those principles. Ideally, the 2018 workshop will end the day by formalizing an official position statement on the teaching and study of basic writing that might disseminated outside the organization. Workshop participants will ultimately be participants in developing and establishing a cohesive vision statement on basic writing to the CCCC Executive Council and beyond.

(W.02) Living Feminist Lives: Materialities, Methodologies, and Practices

(W.03) Plant Something: Performance-Rhetoric, Community Writing, and Food Activism

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop will explore community food advocacy organizations and sites for food justice, community building, and education via an interactive discussion and afternoon work party.

Full description:

Community gardens are emerging as important sites for social justice, community building, access to fresh food, and education. (Pena 2005, Cutter- Mackenzie 2008). Ron Finleyrenamed himself the gangsta gardener as part of a larger project to grow food for himself and his community. Integral to this project is his performance of gardening as a gangsta, a deliberate strategy he uses to redefine the gardener as sexy and appealing to urban youth so as to intervene in racist systems that create food deserts and feed the school-to-prison pipeline (Finley 2015, Fair Test 2010). In the documentary about him and other urban gardeners in LA, Can You Dig This, Finley says: “….you see the seed totally changes itself; it destroys itself and then you get life. A lot of things about life made more sense to me the more time I spent in the garden. The garden teaches a system- patience, persistence, care, that things don’t happen instantaneously you know, it is a process, everything is a process.” Embedded in Finley’s thinking is the transformative power of deliberate activist performance, along with a critique of discourse removed from action. At the end of the film he says: “Don’t call me if you want to have meetings and you sit around and talk about doing some shit. Come to the garden, wit your shovel, so we can plant some shit.” This workshop explores what this means for composition studies, for us as academics, teachers and scholars, and as members of diverse communities. It asks us to consider what this means in terms of performing the rhetoric we write: how we, as Frankie Condon suggests, “put [our] money where [our] mouth is” and “[transform] who we think we are or could be with and for others.” How can we rhetorically and physically engage in cultural and material work that contributes to projects like Finley’s and those of other urban food activists without appropriating them?

Building on the rhetorical analysis of Finley’s work and its impact in Eileen Schell, W. Kurt Stavenhagen, and Dianna Winslow’s CCCC 2018 panel: “The Language, Literacy, and Labor of Food Justice: Transforming Communities through Collective Action with Food and Farming,” this workshop investigates the ideological and material work necessary to further food justice. Understanding our field as one that is both deeply committed to praxis and also constrained at times by narrow definitions of literacy, we invite participants to a two-part, day-long workshop that creates a space for us to do as Condon suggests and “[move beyond] the self/other binary to articulating at the joint or point of interdependence between us” and in so doing, “deliberately, reflectively reach for performativity: for being and becoming just as we advocate for justice.”

During the morning workshop, we will open with a discussion of our work; the work of our field; our students’ work; the work of being human in a more-than-human world; and the work of being good neighbors to the diverse people, plants, and other inhabitants of our communities. As Paul Lynch underscores, in the apocalyptic turn in composition studies, worsening material conditions of climate change necessitate both assessment and commensurate performative action to address visceral realities: rising student hunger on college campuses and food insecurity across the globe; the encroachment of for-profit industry into public education and the privatization of other public services and spaces; and troubles posed by climate change demand that we compose a better world (Lynch 2012, Welch and Scott 2016, Broton and Goldrick-Rab 2017, FOA of the UN 2017, Newfield 2018, IPCC 2017). Citing new materialism, indigenous theories of kinship, and activist rhetoric, facilitators will present research and projects that address these challenges, including food justice, social media, and community writing (Gries 2015, Riedner and Mahoney 2008, House 2014, Pennell 2018, Cushman and Blackburn 2013). During the second half of the morning, we will split into small groups for interactive planning sessions that will employ permaculture and retroactive path analysis to visualize ways forward while also focusing our attention on the material at hand (Mollison 1978, Hemenway 2015, Gare 2001).

During the afternoon, we will travel off-site for work parties that pair our words with action. We will partner with area organizations Grow Pittsburgh and 412 Food Rescue to assist in planting seedlings in a greenhouse with the former and perform a “food rescue” with the latter. Working with advocates at these food justice organizations will invite participants to think, talk, touch, and taste as they engage with the spaces and places of Pittsburgh communities and make material-discursive connections with our own campuses and classrooms. Practicing what the morning session will define as relational literacy, such connections will prompt us to consider how to better serve our home communities with our students. Following the model of Transition Townswe will learn more about permaculture and consider applications in other settings (Hopkins 2006). Finally, we will practice using social media during our work party to create an intervention in the convention narrative to draw attention to the material conditions in Pittsburgh, and highlight the work the Pittsburgh community partners are doing to move to better futures as possible actions we can take back to our home communities (Massumi 2002).

(W.04) Performing Our Lives: Creative Nonfiction and (the Art and Rhetoric of) Representation

Sponsored by: Creative Nonfiction Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Creative Writing

Abstract: Participants will explore creative nonfiction through writing to prompts and discussing teaching strategies and issues.

Full description:

This workshop, sponsored by the Creative Nonfiction Standing Group, invites participants to experience a day of writing creative nonfiction and exploring ideas for teaching this multi-faceted genre. The life writing and other genres of creative nonfiction are steeped in the fraught question of representation. How do we represent ourselves? How do we represent others? What are the ethical gains and costs of these endeavors? This workshop focuses on the craft and ethics of composing in these genres as we write to perform ourselves and our lives and learn how to teach our students to do so.

Schedule:
9:00 Introductions
9:15 Prompts 1 & 2
9:30-10:30 Writing time & sharing
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45 Presentation 1
11:15 Prompts 3 & 4
11:25-12:30 Writing time & sharing
12:30-1:30 Lunch (sharing of writing encouraged)
1:30 Presentation 2
2:00 Prompts 5 & 6
2:10-3:00 Writing time & sharing
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15 Prompts 7 & 8
3:25-4:15 Writing time & sharing/revision
4:15-4:50 Reading of excerpts from the day’s writing; reflections on teaching approaches
4:50 Evaluation

SPEAKER 1 (prompt): Hide and Seek
Write about something you’ve hidden: perhaps it’s a letter, a gift, a bottle, a scar, a bill, your web browser history, a tattoo, your natural hair color. Write about what you’ve hidden but also seek understanding, whether you’re seeking to understand your own motivation or the particular effects (on yourself and others) of hiding something.

SPEAKER 2 (prompt): Whose Memory Is It Anyway?
Memories tug at us, haunt us, ground, and inspire us. But memories are rarely wholly our own. Choose a memory that includes one or more people and write about the time/place/event from one of these other perspectives. Or write about a memory you treasure, but that was largely constructed for you – think, perhaps, of family or community lore that you weren’t necessarily present for and yet have memories of through stories and/or pictures.

SPEAKERS 3 & 4 (presentation): Performing the Liminal: Creative Nonfiction as Lived Practice
Creative nonfiction occupies liminal space, existing at the interstices of various genres and definitional contradictions. CNF both bridges and frustrates divides between creative and academic modes; personal and scholarly. Far from a vexed position, this interstitial placement is powerfully productive in genre, method, and pedagogy. The presentation discusses the ways that CNF’s generativity derives from its liminality and argues that CNF develops student capacity to inhabit liminal spaces and derive the benefit of negative capability, perhaps more effectively than rhetoric-based models of composition instruction.

SPEAKER 5 (prompt): Performance (and Frame)
For this exercise we’ll generate titles as the first act of writing performance, using those titles to frame lists of rapid-fire details. For inspiration, we’ll skim two essays from Brevity—Brian Arundel’s “The Things I’ve Lost” and Gretchen Legler’s “Things That Appear Ugly or Troubling but Upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful.” Students asked to do this essay have come up with such gems as: “Times I Wish My Car Had Broken Down” and “Relationships I’ve Lost Because We Kissed During the Wrong Scene of a Movie.”

SPEAKER 6 (prompt): The Microscope and the Telescope
Change the lens on a writing-in-progress. View the experience from a microscope: If there is skin, look at the pores; if there are leaves, study the veins. Change to the telescope: Leap from first person POV to third. Move from explaining the present to exploring the past or speculating on the future. Write an earth-bound experience from the vantage point of the moon. How do the lenses change what you offer the reader?

SPEAKER 7 (presentation): True Stories as Witness to the Human Condition
This presentation will examine common elements of true stories that witness to the human condition, using David Sedaris’s “Let It Snow” as a tragi-comic case in point. These stories, highly specific, yet universal, are about people on the edge. They are full of surprises, problems to solve, possibilities, resilience, advocacy, and hope, expressed through plot, characters, dialogue and action. Their life-saving power provides models for all to hear and tell their own.

SPEAKER 8 (prompt): Letter
Adapted from psychologist James Pennebaker’s work with expressive writing and healing, this prompt invites participants to write a letter to someone they have an intimate connection with such as a partner, family member, or close friend. Choose an unresolved conflict to immediately or eventually address in the letter. The conflict could be something smaller like stealing your sibling’s Halloween candy or larger like addressing an infidelity.

SPEAKER 9 (prompt): Sense Memory
We well know the power of the senses of smell and taste and their connection to memory: your grandmother’s perfume, fresh-mown lawns, chess pie, etc. What about the flip side of that scenario? How do smell and taste remind us of how we’ve evolved and what we’re glad to leave behind?

SPEAKER 10 (prompt): Performing Silence
Think of a time when you deliberately performed silence. Was your silence an act of resistance, or an expression of accord? Did it signal acquiescence, humility, compassion, distrust? Return to the moment with your body and the space it inhabited: where were you, and what were you doing? Zoom in: what was happening in your muscles, your gut? First describe the details that conveyed your silence’s meaning. Then, if you like, give direct voice to the words underneath that silence.

SPEAKER 11 (prompt): Spectacular Opera Performances: Do They Strike a Chord?
According to American composer Robert Starer, “The sung word is stronger than the spoken word. It evokes hard-to-reach places in the human soul.” After listening to two spectacular opera performances, see if they strike a chord with you. Does the sung word resonate with something in your soul? Given the plot and the opera characters’ plight, what might be shared human experiences? Do the characters remind you of a time when you were in a similar situation?

(W.05) Remixing Performance in Games

Sponsored by: Council for Play and Game Studies

Level: All

Cluster: Information Technologies

Abstract: Participants will explore theories of play and games emphasizing performance, remixing existing games to create new performances, and concluding with an escape room challenge.

Full description:

Similar to how academic writing demands students perform in strange and often uncomfortable ways, games demand performance of players. Within games, play, mechanics, and narrative intertwine to create a multi-layered ethos that players perform. As the embodiment of gameplay often elicits emotions from and between them, players come to empathize with (Isbister) or critically resist and subvert (Sicart) the specific subject positions and narratives that games create for them. But games have become so pervasive and commonplace that we hardly recognize how they support prevailing rhetorics of power. Nonetheless, even the simplest of games offer the means with which students not only develop their abilities to comprehend these power structures but also tactically subvert them. This remixing of games, in other words, demands that the students performthrough the processes of critical inquiry, interpretation, and presentation which in turn transfers to their composition practices.

To begin, workshop participants will briefly survey theories underpinning approaches to various types of performance in games. Play is typically divided into at least three identities or roles simultaneously occupied by players: a person playing a game (social role), a player working within the parameters of a game (player role), and a character in a world (performative role) (Fine; Hendricks; MacKay; Cover). These roles are determined and constrained by game mechanics, the operations and actions that are possible to perform in a game. Facilitators will encourage participants to analyze how these game elements convey rhetorical spaces and possible roles that players can perform through play.

As Ian Bogost argues in Persuasive Games, game procedures, specifically the mechanics and rules of gameplay, create embodied arguments for players. However, as Miguel Sicart notes, games create a dialectical interplay between procedural gameplay and the often ideologically-laden narrative worlds they represent. Changes made to game mechanics necessarily alter the messages they communicate and performances they evoke. In the next section of the workshop, small groups will collaborate on disrupting one of several games provided to them. In the game of tic-tac-toe, for example, how do familiarity and pattern recognition elicit performances that simulate the banal and “everyday”? How might we intervene in these simulations to disrupt the roles players perform? What narratives are evoked when the Xs and Os are replaced with other tokens? What tactics need to be reconfigured if we manipulate the familiar 3×3 grid? As a result, the interplay between the narrative world and the mechanics that enact its ideology thrusts players into a particular performative roleor ethos, similar to ancient Greek notions of ethos as habituated action (Hawhee; Holmes).

The second part of the workshop will consist of a stations-style breakout session, allowing participants to explore examples of classroom-ready games in action, each station guided by a facilitator or two. Specifically, we will make use of the full spectrum of games: live-action role playing games, tabletop role-playing games, augmented and virtual reality games, board games, card games, and mobile games. We will challenge participants to critically examine the game mechanics and the worlds they build at each station, then purposefully and meaningfully remix one game mechanic in order to create a new rhetorical world. Specifically, participants will re-envision how these mechanics can teach by embodying a particular ideological narrative world, but then we will introduce a critical disruption by introducing the idea of remix: asking them to use the same mechanic to embody a different ideological narrative or to use the same narrative to embody a different game mechanic. Through play, they will then investigate the types of performances their alterations encourage, and the group will reflect on their experiences. We will explore questions of how games elicit performance and perform upon players, focusing on cooperative performance and which performative qualities mesh effectively with writing. For instance, traditionally, tic-tac-toe is a game of dominance where one player tries to defeat the other by claiming a line of space first. What happens when the winner is destroying the claimed space with toxic chemicals? How could the goals and rules of the game change as a result? What happens when the winner is setting aside the space for a national park? How could players renegotiate the rules to make the game cooperative, freeing up more space for conversation?

Finally, we will conclude with an “escape the workshop” challenge that utilizes clues participants earn as they participate within the workshop, and in order to figure out the clues, they will have to perform the workshop’s themes of remix, creative thinking, and collaboration. Escape Rooms demonstrate the power of games that intensify play through the situational narrative of escape as well as demanding that players inhabit a role; at the very least they play as themselves trying to escape the room, but escape rooms can do much more world building to push players to take on other types of roles. As such, our escape room scenario will particularly emphasize the conference theme of performance. CCCC 2018 featured an Escape Room game themed around composition, and this was so well-received by our community, we want to involve that format in our workshop.

Sources/References to consider:
• Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design + deck of lenses
• Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop
• Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design
• Jennifer Grouling Cover, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games
• Douglas Eyman and Andrea Davis, Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games
• Amy M. Green, Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative
• Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece
• Steve Holmes, The Rhetoric of Games as Embodied Practice: Procedural Habits
• Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games
• Miguel Sicart, “Game, Player, Ethics: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Games,” International Review of Information Ethics, 4, 13-18.
• Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
• Mary Flanagan, Critical Play

(W.06) Lights, Camera, Action: Performance and Performing in Writing Center Origins

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop reviews creating, building, founding, and/or redesigning Writing Centers. Bedford St Martins is providing lunch and the St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors for all workshop participants.

Full description:

ACT I. Vision/Missions (9:00-9:45)
Session Performers: Performer 3, Performer 5, Performer 10
Just as a movie director has a vision for a screenplay, we need a vision for our centers. When we build a brand-new writing center, or significantly re-vision an existing writing center, creators can use vision/mission statements to represent and name the work the center performs for the campus community. This section of the workshop will focus on working with vision/mission statements, using campus-based research to craft the statements, thinking through ways to focus these statements, problematizing these performances of vision/mission by reviewing sample statements, and crafting our own new (or re-visioned) statements.

ACT II. Space (9:50-10:35)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 8
Whether it’s a one-act play or the latest Oscar winner, the setting of a performance has an immediate effect on the audience. It prepares us for how to approach a given situation. The same holds true for our writing center spaces. When building a writing center from the ground up, what sort of design/aesthetic choices need to be made? This section will discuss some of the conversations that need to be had in designing a new writing center, as well as bring in scholarship to support the idea of a welcoming space. Participants will be able to work together to brainstorm how best to design their writing center space, while also considering common roadblocks like budgetary constraints and administrative pushback.

ACT III. Budget (10:40-11:25)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 3
Budget performances can be Oscar winning or Rotten Tomato worthy. In this section, we will conduct some impromptu performances of identifying budget topics. Then, we will ask co-star audience participants to imagine themselves in A Field of Their Dreams where drama and fantasy collide into Writing Center budget episodes. We will work together to identify budgetary needs and find solutions to meet those needs that at least qualify as worthy mentions. Audience participants will receive handouts and worksheets to assist in their future independent performances.

ACT IV. Outreach (11:30-12:15)
Session Performers: Performer 6, Performer 9, Performer 10
Performance-rhetoric allows writing centers to think about outreach as “making our relations” with others across and beyond our campus communities. In this workshop segment, participants will continue to work with their vision/mission statements, identifying campus and community partners and common initiatives. We will explore the collaborative roles of advisory boards, WAC initiatives, and regional and international organizations. Through these discovery performances, we will consider how collaborative roles can shape or reshape our values. Audience participants will receive contact information for their regional and national/international organizations.

****INTERMISSION (Lunch Break (12:15-12:45))****
Lunch is hosted by Bedford/St. Martin’s
includes a copy of The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

ACT V. Tutors (12:45-1:30)
Session Performers: Performer 4, Performer 5
To have a great show, directors need performers. In the Writing Center Community Theater, our main performers are our tutors. ACT V will review tutor roles, the talents that tutors bring to their roles in collaborative learning, and the advantages and disadvantages of working with undergraduate peer tutors, graduate students, and professional tutors. With an eye towards diversity in casting (hiring), engaging tutoring as performance and hiring as casting, we will roleplay with workshop participants.

ACT IV. Tutor Training: (1:35-3:30)
Performers: Performer 1, Performer 4, Performer 5, Performer 7
Any good production is supported by a cast of thousands. Performers in ACT IV will consider how we direct our resources and relationships to support tutor education and training. How can we leverage university partnerships. As with any script writing workshop, Performers and audience participants will discuss scripts that include climactic performances, such as: collaborative partnering between high school and university Writing Centers, options for initial training and for sustaining quality writing tutoring (with and without partners) and certification opportunities.

ACT VII. Assessment (3:35-4:45)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 2, Performer 5
Engage and leverage your writing center data. Learning to perform the role of resource advocate for your center is often learned on the job for many writing center directors. Come participate in an interactive session that focuses on developing measurable learning outcomes, building annual reports that effectively tell your center’s story, and training tutors to create post session narratives that highlight the work they do in meaningful ways. Learning the dance of the annual report and how to choreograph your data moves you closer to the BIG TIME.

(W.07) Co-Exploring International Writing Research and Rehearsing Scholarly Performances

Sponsored by: International Researchers Consortium

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: Thirty-two writing scholars from 20 countries co-explore and rehearse in-process research projects and their complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts.

Full description:

Our performances as writing scholars involve more than just composing and publishing research. We must also engage with diverse traditions, methods, and theories from around the globe. Complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts often complicate these performances. That said, writing scholars rarely have an open space to “rehearse” with each other across these contexts. In this workshop, participants will enter dialogic conversations to give and receive rich feedback on their research and deeply reflect on higher education writing research from around the world. The design of this workshop also allows scholars to interact with audiences not always accessible during the writing process. Scholars studying writing in different languages are welcomed, especially those typically underrepresented in the field.

This workshop is made up of 32 writing researchers, who will be designated as workshop facilitators. In advance of the workshop, 27 of the facilitators will share works-in-progress with a brief explanation of theoretical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Each facilitator and all additional registrants will read the works-in-progress and choose 5 before attending the workshop. Then each facilitator will lead a table discussion on their piece. All perspectives will be explored on equal footing with other “embodied performances” and potential audiences. The facilitator-participants will rehearse their current findings and questions, encounter many international perspectives, and perform as both agents and audiences throughout the day. Throughout the workshop, all participants will foster deep engagement with each other’s work and discuss various avenues for publication.

The projects represent new developments in writing studies from Bangladesh, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jordan, South Korea, KSA, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philippines, South Asia, Syria, Sweden, Scotland, UAE, UK, and US . The 21 projects and 32 writing researchers from diverse national, cross-national, disciplinary, and multilingual contexts form the heart of the workshop exchanges. In other words, these projects and how they interrelate throughout the day will be the content of this workshop. The workshop chairs will provide the framework for these discussions and guide them towards overall themes and future applications. Understanding how different methodologies “perform” in various projects will be a key focus. Some of the represented methodologies include genre theory, archival research, interviews and surveys with students and faculty in specific contexts, corpus analysis, microgenetic analysis of student writing, analysis of institutional policy documents, ethnographic approaches to disciplines, participatory action research, and digital tracking.
Workshop goals

The workshop includes 3 interactive activities, 2 to be completed before the CCCC.

First, by January, workshop facilitators post the following on a wiki (see http://compfaqs.org/CompFAQsInternational/InternationalWritingStudies):

-A draft research text, description of the rhetorical situation of the work, and glossary of context/culture-specific terms to be used at the workshop.
-A digest of key theorists and methods and rationale for their use.
-A “public” abstract of the project for non-expert audiences.

Second, the texts are grouped into 6 clusters of 3-4 projects on the wiki.

From January to March, workshop participants (facilitators and any additional registrants) choose a text from each cluster to read closely, freeing workshop time for real dialogue. A video chat event between January and the CCCC allows participants to get to know each other.

Third, all facilitators will join small group discussions at CCCC with each selected author/text across the day. When not leading their own group, facilitators become audiences for other registrants. Everyone encounters current, ongoing writing research, research questions, and emergent or well-established methods from several countries. Each project receives attentive and sustained discussion, as participants question assumptions, negotiate tensions and differences, and model practices that resist simple dichotomies. As the workshop progresses, facilitators will construct a collective sense of possible responses to the shared performances of the day.

Morning session
9:00-9:15 Introduction
9:15-10:00 Small-group discussions, 1st cluster of texts
10:00-10:15 Break
10:15-11:00 Small-group discussions, 2nd cluster
11:00-11:45 Small-group discussions, 3rd cluster
11:45-12:30 Whole-group discussion, sharing notes from clusters

Afternoon session
1:30-1:45 Review of the morning discussion.
1:45-2:30 Small-group discussions, 4th cluster
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:30 Small-group discussions, 5th cluster
3:30-4:15 Small-group discussions, 6th cluster
4:15-5:00 Final discussion: How do we define performance in our research and how do we bring that research to new audiences?

Chairs’ Focus Questions
To engage with conference themes, the workshop chairs keep track of threads and look for connections with these questions:

How are different theories and methodologies embodied in specific cultural, linguistic, and social contexts?

What kinds of performances are available globally and across cultures?

What kinds of performances among different research subjects and stakeholders are hidden in the research we do?

How do local settings shape the teaching and research of writing?

How can international communities of writing scholars best perform together with the texts and contexts of higher education while working towards responsible mutual engagement?

How can we help each other disseminate our research in ways that can transform our performances in the broader field of writing research?

The workshop promises a deep collaborative performance across international contexts, engaging projects and people in sensitive, responsible, and productive ways.

(W.08) Developing an Indigenous Scholarly Practice: An Indigenous Rhetorics Research and Writing Retreat

Sponsored by: Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: This workshop, sponsored by the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship, is designed to introduce Indigenous theories, practices, and approaches to research and writing.

Full description:

Rationale:
The practice of Indigenous rhetorics (alphabetic, visual, digital, performative, oral, and material) is positioned at the meeting grounds between Rhetoric & Composition and American Indian studies. Scholars of Indigenous rhetorics are concerned with complicated questions about the relationships between power, history, knowledge-making, literacy, and language. As scholars of Indigenous rhetorics, decoloniality guides our research and writing as we seek to provide additional options to rhetorical production and are invested in decolonial movements. Indigenous rhetorics scholarship, research methodologies, and narrative approaches are ultimately used for decolonial and social justice work. In this full-day workshop, we will hold an Indigenous rhetorics writing and research retreat that will make space for those who are interested in learning more about Indigenous rhetorics and the narrative and methodological approaches related to Indigenous theories and worldviews. In many ways, this workshop responds to Vershawn A. Young’s acknowledgement that there is a dominant assumption that rhetoric is simply “words.” In this workshop, participants will understand how to develop an Indigenous rhetorics scholarly practice that is embodied, relational, rooted in the land, in practice, and ancestral.

Since we believe that our entire discipline can benefit from implementing Indigenous practices, approaches, and methodologies, we see this workshop as a “research retreat” where scholar-teachers from all backgrounds can learn about various forms of Indigenous knowledge-making, practice these forms of knowledge-making, and discuss ways to approach Indigenous forms of research in their teaching.

Focus:
This workshop, sponsored by the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship, is designed to introduce key theories, practices, and orientations to Indigenous approaches to researching and writing.

The goals of this workshop are: 1) for participants to develop a deeper understanding of the possible roles that Indigenous rhetorics can play in their research, writing, and teaching through a series of presentations and hands-on activities focused on relational accountability, storying as methodology, rhetorical listening, and acknowledgement of embodied differences. 2) To support participants as they begin to develop and apply a foundation of Indigenous writing and research methodologies to use in their research and decolonial and social justice oriented pedagogy. 3) To discuss the ways that the stories we share develop our theoried worlds, weave together agents in diverse worldviews, and develop meaningful relationships that seek to sustain our knowledge-making communities through Indigenous rhetorical practices. 4) To frame performance-composition through Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies with/in embodied practices that are relational, responsible, and reflective.

We’ll accomplish these goals in three ways: 1) by providing intellectual contexts to anchor activities for the workshop; 2) by providing hands-on learning opportunities and activities for participants aimed directly at strategies for incorporating Indigenous text makings and practices that acknowledge embodiment as an important part of relational accountability for scholars working with/in Indigenous rhetorics; and 3) by modelling storying as methodology alongside rhetorical listening as important practices within Indigenous rhetorics. This learning-based workshop, then, focuses on the needs of our participants by providing them with opportunities to work with experienced scholars of Indigenous rhetorics. In addition, we’ll supply a wide array of resources for participants to develop ways they may want to incorporate these embodied practices responsibly into their research and pedagogy.

Activities/Sequence:
This full-day workshop begins the way that scholarship in Indigenous rhetorics begins with the history and language of the peoples on whose lands we’re located – the Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania. This context is necessary in order to understand the work of Indigenous rhetorics as always already anchored in the cultures, beliefs, and worldviews lived in Indigenous spaces. During these 20-minute presentations, facilitators will provide crucial information for each topic and then invite participants to engage in the knowledge-making practice related to the topic or model.

Speaker 1 – Getting Started with Indigenous Rhetorics: Key Words and Concepts
Foundational to practicing Indigenous rhetorics is knowing and understanding key words and concepts associated with them. Drawing on the work of rhetoric, composition, education, and American Indian Studies scholars, workshop participants will work through naming, defining, and giving shape to terms and concepts through examples situated in historic and current Indigenous contexts. While not exhaustive, this substantive review lays groundwork for workshop sessions that follow.

Speaker 2 – Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous Forms of Research
Facilitators will discuss how our positionality/orientation to the Indigenous communities we work with reflects or challenges how research was historically conducted within Indigenous communities. By looking at how different writers identify their positionality/orientation and its influence on their research, we will explore how this affects our research, methodologies, and practices.

Speaker 3 – Understanding Community: Relational Accountability, Reciprocity, and Respect
Workshop participants will discuss the intricacies of building relationships with Indigenous communities (their rhetorics and ways of being) and will discuss how to implement various kinds of community-based research and methodologies, including research and classroom practice.

Speaker 4 – Cherokee Doubleweaving
In a move to bridge material rhetorics, stories, epistemologies, and methodologies, we will include a hands-on activity that will guide attendees as they create Cherokee double-walled baskets, specifically highlighting the embodied praxis of interdisciplinary scholarly and pedagogical conversations (Driskill, 2010) as a way to collaborate by disrupting colonial knowledge-making.

Speaker 5 – Story as Methodology
Presenters will provide multiple examples of what it looks like to build story as a methodology. We will ask participants to write a story about a research experience and then discuss how to use it in a publication as the theoretical framing.

Schedule:
History of Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania, 8:00am-8:15am
Getting started with Indigenous rhetorics: key words and concepts 8:20am-8:40am
Activity: Getting started with Indigenous rhetorics: 8:45am-9:15am
Break: 9:20am-9:30am
Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous forms of research, 9:35am-9:55am
Activity: Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous forms of research, 10:00am-10:30am
Break, 10:35 am-10:45 am
Understanding community: relational accountability, reciprocity, and respect, 10:50am – 11:10am
Activity, Understanding community, 11:20am – 11:40am
Pre-lunch reflection, 11:45am-noon
Lunch: 12-1pm
Cherokee doubleweaving, 1:00pm-1:20pm
Activity, Cherokee doubleweaving , 1:25pm-2:00pm
Break: 2:00pm-2:15pm
Story as methodology. 2:20pm-2:40pm
Activity: Story as methodology, 2:45pm-3:15pm
Break: 3:15pm-3:30pm
Small group brainstorming and project development, 3:30pm-4:30pm
Closing and Reflection, 4:45pm-5:00pm

(W.09) Establishing a Community of Inquiry in Online Writing Courses through Student and Instructor Presence

Sponsored by: Online Writing Instruction Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This workshop aids instructors in establishing a successful Community of Inquiry (CoI) within their online classes.

Full description:

In this workshop, we will help instructors establish a Community of Inquiry (CoI) within their online classes. The establishment of a CoI aids in the construction of deep and meaningful knowledge among all who participate in the communication practices of the community when the CoI is established through an interaction of three presences: teaching, social, and cognitive (Swan, Garrison, & Richardson, 2009). Instructors must establish their own presence while simultaneously encouraging students to be more present in the online medium; the combination of the two facilitates cognitive presence and deeper engagement and learning. A fourth element in the CoI framework, as posited by Akyol and Garrison (2011), is assessment insofar as the authors suggest that instructors need to focus on assessing student learning outcomes in order to understand the depth of learning that occurs with interactive and collaborative approaches to teaching online. Thus, we add the fourth element of assessment as a way for instructors to assess student learning through projects they create and in-depth reflections they write on course outcomes.

Much of the scholarship provides context for a CoI framework in online settings (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer 2010); to continue the conversation, we suggest that technology can enhance these four elements. Instructors can establish presence through screencapture feedback (Stannard 2007; Siegel, 2006), synchronous video (Cho & Tobias, 2016), and multimodal instructional tools (Bourelle, 2017; Rubin, Fernandes, & Avgerinou, 2013), designing the course in such a way that students are interacting with one another through the use of similar technological tools. However, this argument presupposes that instructors not only know how to scaffold the classroom and use technology appropriately, but to first know how to use the technology to develop such an approach and to then to assess student-created multimodal compositions. As such, this workshop focuses on: 1) helping instructors develop presence through technology, test-driving low-stakes software (Jing or Screencast-O-Matic); 2) helping students establish presence through using similar software in collaborative learning spaces; 3) engaging students with course content using technology to aid in collaborative exploration, inquiry, and reflection; and 4) assessment of student learning as evidenced in their multimodal projects as a way to support student learning and curricular redesign. Upon completion of the workshop, attendees will leave with concrete instructional tools and actionable items they can implement in their online classes.

The CoI Framework in Writing Studies: (Plenary, 15 minutes)

Our plenary speaker will introduce participants to the CoI Framework, describing how the framework has been researched and employed in online and blended learning contexts. She will reflect on the potential for using this framework as a heuristic for designing and assessing online writing courses, sharing data from previous and ongoing mixed methods studies that investigate the extent to which blended and online writing courses function as CoIs. She will conclude with a discussion of the relationship between instructional design and tool selection, inviting participants to share their own experiences with engaging students in technology-mediated learning environments.

Presentation 1: Instructor Presence (1 hour)
Arguably, the instructor’s presence is the greatest departure from the traditional classroom that online writing instruction (OWI) creates—a point emphasized by research that shows that instructor presence is the feature of asynchronous online education that students miss most. Therefore, online writing instructors often develop strategies to compensate for their absence, such as participating in discussion board assignments, posting videos of themselves, using synchronous video, and providing feedback in various ways, including multimedia, on student work. In this presentation, we will explain the importance of instructor presence and instructor absence by working with the participants to understand what we need to be present for and how we can help students learn in our absence.

Coffee Break: 15 minutes

Presentation 2: Student Presence (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will offer examples of how to provide opportunities for student presence in the digital environment, in addition to seeking input from participants about practices they have implemented to build student presence online. We will look to complicate the discussion, however, by considering the implications of building student presence, especially where that might involve audio/video/image created by the student, and/or where presence-building activities move students into less common LMS tools or outside of the LMS entirely. What are the implications for accessibility? For privacy? And how do we align student presence building with course objectives that perhaps make no mention of such activities?

Lunch Break 12-1:30

Presentation 3: Cognitive Presence (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will discuss how to engage students with course content using synchronous technology to aid in collaborative exploration, inquiry, and reflection. While much scholarship examines asynchronous communication, particularly the use of discussion forums in OWI (Cho & Tobias, 2016; Wright & Street, 2007), this presentation will focus on other technologies, particularly those that allow for synchronous communication to support cognitive presence (Rockinson-Szapkiw, Wendt, Whighting, & Nisbet, 2016). We will look at online courses delivered via synchronous video conference as well as an asynchronous online writing class that provides synchronous options (e.g., Zoom and Google Hangouts) for student-student interaction as well as student-instructor interaction.

Coffee Break: 15 minutes

Presentation 4: Assessment (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will talk through how to assess multimodal projects, reflections, and eportfolios in ways that support student learning and curricular design within the online CoI. We will showcase student projects and corresponding rubrics, leading the audience through a discussion of providing effective summative and formative feedback throughout the students’ composing process (Borton and Huot, 2009). We will also discuss how to assign and use reflection as a way to assess students’ projects, using Shipka’s (2011) Statements of Goals and Choices (SOGCs) as a framework. Lastly, we will discuss using White’s (2005) idea of in-depth reflections to guide students’ self-evaluation within eportfolios.

Reflection/Entire Group Discussion (30 minutes, 5-minute reflection/25-minute discussion)
In a final reflection with the entire group, we will discuss how attendees will enact what they learned in their own classes.

(W.10) Performing Rhetorical Activism: Latinxs in the Community and in the Academy

CCCC 2019: Wednesday Afternoon Workshops

Afternoon Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 1:30 to 5:00 p.m.

(AW.01) “Grantwriting and Community Engagement Pedagogy: How to Create and Adapt a Course for Your Particular Milieu”

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Facilitators will introduce grant-writing pedagogy through the lens of ethics and social justice, then move participants towards designing a course adapted to their particular communities.

Full description:

In this workshop, facilitators will share our experiences with grantwriting pedagogy, then move participants towards considering how to design a course within the particular context of their communities at two and four year colleges and universities. The workshop will engage participants at every turn in relation to pedagogy, social justice, and the ethics of community engagement; we will aim to expand their expectations of what student writing can accomplish.

In “The Community Grant Writing Project: A Flexible Service-Learning Model,” (Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2014; 18:1), Courtney Stevens lays out one potential structure for grantwriting pedagogy based on her work at Williamette in writing intensive first year seminars (263): her students in a Poverty and Public Policy themed course volunteered 12 hours a semester with Habitat for Humanity and Farmworker Housing Development Corporation while then providing “grant writing materials…[and] research and narratives for prospective grant proposals (267). The community engagement office at Williamette helped Stevens identify and interview partners, then partners visited three times: first, to present an assignment description to students, second, to present drafts, and third to finalize and reflect. Students also wrote in other genres related to the course and wrote a “traditional term paper.”

While Stevens’ model worked well for her, we recognize that because each university and each instructor differs so greatly from one to the other, we want to extend the range of possible manifestations of a grantwriting course. For this reason, we will offer a workshop that encourages participants to construct a model that is unique to the specific needs of their communities and that takes into consideration the teaching of cultural competence as a necessary core to this pedagogy. Some of our workplaces, surprisingly, still don’t have the support of a community engagement office. In other contexts, grantwriting works better as a component in an upper level or graduate course. In others still, service learning where students travel to sites just isn’t feasible with the constraints of the curriculum.

Grant writing also provides composition instructors with a unique intersection between the twin themes of performance rhetoric and composition. Because grant readers (reviewers, awards committees at nonprofit organizations) represent a finite, specific, knowable audience, the grant application is a tangible rhetorical act. Additionally, the grantwriting process is an embodied performance intended to persuade an audience to act on the presented idea–to award the proposers a sum of money to enable them to perform specific actions. A culminating performance is often when students get the chance to lead work meetings with outside contstituents or when guest speakers, who present on content that reflects their writing, embody the research they’ve been working so hard on.

The multi-institutional and interdisciplinary work of this workshop takes the stance that privilege is meant to be shared, and that this act of sharing takes a lifetime of effort; thus, we believe that not only students–but we must also position ourselves in relation to the “other” or to those who have less privilege than we do (urban middle-schoolers in the City, refugees, etc.). The work of grantwriting pedagogy is centered around the historical and contemporary connections between university and community in the sense that writing is practiced as a way to advocate for full and equal participation of all groups. We acknowledge the legacies of injustice in our regions, we acknowledge our privileges, and we see how the work we do can have a positive impact on our collective futures. The curriculum ideas we discuss balance the practical aspects of workplace writing with theorizing and reflecting specifically on the social and cultural climate of our homes, what NPOs do there, why they do it, and on writing in relation to our communities, advocacy, and altruism. We believe in partnering with at least 50% organizations that not only serve people of diverse backgrounds but that are led by those folks as well.

Facilitator One created and runs a project at Towson University called Grantwriting In Valued Environments (G.I.V.E.), a university supported project of the English Department, that advances students’ professional writing goals by connecting their coursework to the writing needs of small non-profit organizations in the Baltimore/Washington region. Students so far have raised $173,530 all going directly to NPOs; we just submitted our largest grant of $300,000. Regularly, students also participate through internships, independent studies, and part-time paid employment. Facilitator One also leads Intergroup Dialogue workshops and is a vocal advocate for racial and social justice on campus.

Facilitator Two began teaching grant writing at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2005. Originally offered as a special topics class, Grant Writing developed into a stand-alone course and is taught at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level in both the English and Masters of Public Administration programs. It also was the genesis of a Writing for Nonprofits certificate program in the English department. Grant Writing is offered in both “face to face” and in online programs. Students and faculty have partnered with a variety of nonprofit agencies and have written funded grant applications totaling more than $700,000 on behalf of various agencies.

Facilitator Three, a renowned Disability Studies scholar, will model that relative newbie experience in terms of grantwriting pedagogy and talk about teaching a hybrid grant-writing and creative writing course.

(AW.02) Handcrafted Rhetorics: DIY and the Public Power of Made Things

(AW.03) Bridging the Semiotic Channels: Teaching Discussion and Oral Performance in the Writing Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This half-day workshop will offer new strategies for encouraging students’ oral participation and for creating more complex and recursive relationships between writing and oral performance.

Full description:

Noting the ways that performance studies can inform rhetorical studies, Bernadette Marie Calafell asserts that performance, “works against dominant conceptions of knowledge by locating itself in and theorizing through the body. […] It embodies and drives a sustained critique of discourse” (116). Building on the potential that Calafell observes, this workshop will consider the methodologies behind the most literally embodied form of discourse that students undergo in our courses: oral classroom participation.

Such a consideration is long overdue, given the enormous role that oral performance plays in students’ classroom experience. In terms of the day-to-day labor we expect students to perform in our classrooms, time spent speaking and listening likely exceeds everything else, including writing. However, relatively few instructors teach students to think about oral participation in the same nuanced terms that we think about writing. Instead, we expect students to teach themselves the genres and objectives of oral discourse and to develop their methods of engagement reflexively, rather than reflectively.

In this workshop, we will examine students’ oral participation as a category of classroom performance that is separate from, but related to, performance in text. Among the key questions we will examine together are:

• How can we teach students to develop and deploy a nuanced set of oral skills in the classroom?
• How can we use textual performance to inspire new kinds of oral performance?
• How can we use technology to change the way students’ written and oral discourses intersect in the classroom?
• How can we use oral performance strategically to engage and accommodate all students, especially students who have been resistant to or uncomfortable with traditional classroom discourses?

The workshop will be structured in three segments, each designed to highlight a critical issue in student oral participation and model pedagogies that presenters have developed to address these issues. In corresponding breakout sessions, participants will have a chance to discuss these pedagogies and offer suggestions of their own. Participants will complete the workshop with new ideas about strategies and assignments that encourage successful oral performance in the writing classroom.

Workshop Agenda

Opening Free Write: 10 min
We will open the session by asking participants to jot down their responses to three questions:
1. What forms of oral performance do you expect student to perform in your classroom?
2. How do these forms of oral performance serve the objectives of your course?
3. What particular skills do students need to participate successfully in these activities?

Session 1: Locating Oral Performance in the Curriculum

Presentation 1 (20 min):
Speaker 1 will discuss the existing scholarship on students’ oral participation, with special emphasis on the disparity between the purposes that students and teachers assign to oral participation and the means we use to teach and assess it. Survey data indicates that both students and faculty define oral participation in complex, multi-genre terms, but instructors rarely teach discussion skills in this way, and both teachers and students tend to evaluate oral participation purely in terms of how many students speak and how often. Speaker 1 will conclude by suggesting a curriculum for teaching oral skills that parallels the methods of the Teaching for Transfer curriculum in FYC.

Breakout 1 (30 min):
In this session, participants will discuss the particular ways that students’ oral participation manifests in their classrooms and the particular skills that students need to participate successfully. This session will also model a game-based approach to class discussion developed by Presenter 1.

Session 2: Using “Social Annotation” to Connect Writing and Speech

Presentation 2 (20 min):
Presenter 2 will introduce “social annotation” as a practice that can bridge the gap between “classroom discussion” and formal academic prose. Beginning with the oft-cited Burkean metaphor of “the [scholarly, academic] conversation,” they will pose a series of questions: Can we make that metaphor more concrete by making the text’s margins a place where multiple student voices enter into dialogue? What happens to “conversation as performance” when we work online, where contemporary students’ experience of the self as performed is most acute? How can the mediating stage of social annotation help transfer the skills addressed by presentation #1 to more formal student writing?

Breakout 2 (30 min):
The technology of choice for this session, hypothesis.is, generates shared “margins” via a server where annotations keyed to specific elements of a text are hosted, turning anything from readings on a course website to articles on the open web into annotatable texts. Working in groups, participants will be introduced to social annotation technologies; they will then model an annotation-as-discussion exercise that proposes ways the particular moves characteristic of social annotation can inform face-to-face discussion.

Session 3: Multimodal Arguments, Performance, and Student Engagement

Presentation 3 (20 minutes):
Informed by Andrea Lunsford’s argument that Everything’s an Argument, Speaker 3 will address student performance of argument in alternative, nontraditional, and multimodal formats. Oral performance not only works to help scaffold student skills toward particular writing goals, but also functions as a culminating point in a writing course when students use it to demonstrate what they have learned from/about argument writing. Students first translate and then perform, as part of an oral presentation, an argument in a format other than a writing assignment. Additionally, providing all students an opportunity to create and perform argument in a non-traditional format is an inclusive strategy that invites students who may not write well, who might not enjoy writing, or who experience writing as anxiety producing, a way to demonstrate their understanding of how to construct and support an argument in a format they can perform well. Incorporating such performative strategies, formats, genres, and modalities opens argument up to a wide array of cultural influences and forms representative of all students’ backgrounds and experiences.

Breakout 3 (30 minutes):
Speaker 3 will share digital assignment and representative student projects that perform arguments, and invite participants to share examples from their teaching, Participants can begin, individually or collaboratively, to imagine non-traditional, oral, performative versions of writing assignments they assign in their courses as non-written ‘texts’ that perform the same functions as written essays, and that better demonstrate commitments to inclusive pedagogies.

(AW.04) Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Writing Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels and Beyond: Combating Linguistic Racism

Sponsored by: The Language Policy Committee

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: This workshop will develop a course of action that will embolden the participants to combat linguistic racism at different levels, within and outside academia.

Full description:

Language diversity, language attitudes, and multilingualism are at the center stage of students’ performance as writers, rhetoricians, and communicators in higher education and in a global market. Faculty and writing program administrators play a role in this performance as well. We see the need of supporting and honoring students’ home languages and recognizing the value of linguistic differences as a resource in students’ learning. Lovejoy, Fox, and Weeden (2018) remind us of the underlying values of policies such as “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” when they address the importance of understanding “that the diverse linguistic experiences and abilities students bring with them to writing courses represent a strength, a resource, not a deficit or a barrier” (326). Language differences are a resource, and we must not only create awareness of this but also seek and apply anti-racist practices within and beyond the writing classroom. Performing the teaching of rhetoric and writing requires the performance of anti-racist teaching practices. Discriminating against people for their language is linguistic racism. Only until changes are made at the program, departmental, and institutional levels and beyond can we indeed claim to value language diversity as performers/rhetoric and performers/composition. Only until we work towards these changes can we ensure that what we value in education will be sustained, and only then can we conquer linguistic racism.

In this half-day workshop, we have a major purpose: To work together with participants in discussing how as performers/rhetoric and performers/composition we can combat linguistic racism. We will seek answers to questions such as: What can we do as faculty to transform perceptions of cultural and linguistic literacies and language differences? What can we do as writing program administrators? As university and college administrators? As community members? What are specific anti-racist practices that we can apply in the classroom, the writing program, the department, the institution, the workplace, and the community?

Part I: Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels
This part of the workshop will focus on the need of performing anti-racist practices at the writing program, departmental, and institutional levels. We will begin by having participants share with us what their institution is like, their institutional context, and what their writing programs consist of. We will address how a multilevel approach can include aspects such as language policies within departments. Others could be: first-year experience programs, writing certificate programs, learning communities, the Writing Center, service-learning projects, and university events. From this discussion, we will move to a group activity. If possible, a short video will be presented, showing educators/scholars performing some type of linguistic justice work.

Activity 1 (small groups): Participants and LPC (Language Policy Committee) members will work in groups and brainstorm possible practices that can be implemented in First-Year and other Writing Programs and at the departmental and institutional levels to stop linguistic racism. Large Post-It Sheets will be used to list these practices. These will be placed on the wall, and each group will present their findings.

Part II: Performing Anti-Racist Practices in the Workplace and the Community
This part of the workshop will center on presenting strategies for combating linguistic racism in the workplace and the community. Examples could include community events, policies, and trainings. A group activity will follow. If possible, a short video will be presented, showing community members performing some type of linguistic justice work.

Activity 2 (small groups): Participants and LPC members will work in groups and brainstorm possible anti-racist linguistic practices that can be implemented in the workplace and the community. Large Post-It Sheets will be used to list these practices. These sheets will be placed on the wall, and each group will present their findings.

After having a discussion of all the listed practices, we will summarize the major findings. We will conclude our workshop with one final activity that will be shared with the group as a whole.

Activity 3 (individual): Each participant will write down ONE practice or strategy he/she will implement in the next year to combat linguistic racism at any of the levels discussed in the workshop. The goal is to create a course of action, a plan that will embolden the participants to combat linguistic racism at different levels, within and outside academia.

Proposed Schedule:

1:30-1:45 p.m. – Introductions, Purpose of Workshop, Overview

1:45-2:10 p.m. – Part I – Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels
2:10-2:30 p.m. – Small group activity (Activity 1)
2:30-2:50p.m. – Groups report on their findings/proposed practices and strategies
2:50-3:00 p.m. – Large group discussion on anti-racist practices at the program, departmental, and institutional levels

3:00-3:10 p.m. Break

3:10-3:20 p.m. – Part II – Performing Anti-Racist Practices in the Workplace and the Community
3:20- 3:40 p.m. – Small group activity (Activity 2)
3:40-4:00 p.m. – Groups report on their findings/proposed practices and strategies
4:00-4:15 p.m. – Large group discussion on anti-racist practices in the workplace and the community, leading to last activity
4:15-4:25 p.m. – Individual Activity (Activity 3)
4:25-4:45 p.m. – Participants share their proposed practice(s)/course of action for the coming year

4:45-5:00 p.m. – Wrap up and conclusion

(AW.05) Staying woke on campus: Promoting social justice for multilingual students

Sponsored by: Second Language Writing Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: Discuss practical strategies and theoretical approaches to breaking down monolingualism in understanding multilingual identities, campus conversations, learning outcomes, and pedagogy.

Full description:

Vershawn Ashanti Young has called us to explore how performance-composition can “keep us woke bout our responsibilities to antiracism, to practicing class, gender, and social justice.” The Second Language Writing SG takes up this call by focusing on how we as educators can work towards social justice for multilingual students through classroom practices, campus-wide advocacy, and administrative choices. In particular, we recognize that conversations on college campuses around linguistic difference tend to carry “an undercurrent of racial distinctions” (Shuck, 2006), and to be predicated on outdated ideas of multilingual students as no more than “imitation monolinguals” (Gramling, 2016). To bring about social justice for multilingual students, we must shift the conversations to ones that recognize multilinguals’ unique competencies in moving across languages and cultures (Canagarajah, 2013; You 2016).

Our proposed half-day workshop is intended to bring together writing teachers and tutors, administrators, and graduate students to explore questions such as:

• How can we identify our multilingual student populations?
• What aspects of multilingual student identity might we be misunderstanding? How might our labels for multilingual students be harmful?
• How can we take advantage of rhetorics of diversity and globalization at the university level to advocate for our multilingual students?
• What pedagogical practices can we adopt to break down notions of correctness in ways that create spaces for multilingual students to negotiate?

Our workshop will open with remarks from Shanti Bruce of Nova Southeastern University, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Deirdre Vinyard of the University of Washington, Bothell. Drawing on their experiences conducting a cross-institutional language survey funded by a CCCC Research Initiative Grant, their keynote address will examine how the language terms or labels at our disposal sometimes flatten or hide the complexity of language experiences students bring to campus. Their keynote address, “The Complexity of Institutional Language Surveys,” will take participants through the process of designing a survey that aimed to understand the varied linguistic experiences and identities of our students. The keynote will conclude with an interactive activity in which workshop participants consider together how they might shape their own institutional surveys to capture data that best represents what they believe their campus stakeholders need to know.

Next, our roundtables will offer practical strategies for advocating for multilingual students in both classroom practice and administration, through attention to our assumptions about student identity in teaching and campus conversations, the structure of learning outcomes, plagiarism policies and the adjudication process, and our classroom assessment practices. The workshop will conclude with individual and group reflections on how these strategies can best be implemented in our individual contexts.

Participants can expect tangible “take aways” from this workshop, including:
• How to raise faculty and administration awareness of multilingual students’ issues and perspectives
• How to develop localized learning outcomes that push back against monolingual ideologies, and how to develop teaching materials and assessment criteria that stem from and support those learning outcomes
• How to design pedagogical activities that help students themselves investigate and critique the myth of linguistic homogeneity, ranging from single lessons to major assignments
• How to read between the lines of official plagiarism policy documents, talk to students about plagiarism, and support multilingual students through the adjudication process

Roundtables

1. Complicating Multilingual Writer Identities Within and Beyond Institutional Contexts

Based on an analysis of multilingual student narratives collected as part of a broader study in a university context, facilitators will complicate notions of the multilingual student writer identity. These student narratives shed light on various assumptions that are peer-based, instructor-based and institutionally based. Facilitators will invite discussion that addresses these unproductive (and sometimes unexpected) assumptions about multilingual students. Together we will explore how instructors and administrators across different institutions can find opportunities to better understand their local and international multilingual students’ experiences.

2. Toward Socially-Just and Anti-Racist Student Learning Outcomes

Participants of this interactive roundtable session will explore strategies for promoting linguistic and racial justice through advocating for and teaching student learning outcomes that contest monolingualist ideologies. Together, we will examine ways in which speakers who are visually marked as other—including many ELLs, documented and undocumented students, international students, and domestic students of color—are particularly positioned to benefit from pedagogical practices that confront the racist politics of language. Participants will also explore and co-develop localized learning outcomes (and correlating teaching practices) that aim to work against monolingualism.

3. Engaging Students in Conversations about Multilingualism and Correctness
In our roundtable session, participants will discuss several examples of assignments (including readings, class activities, and major writing projects) that the presenters have used to actively counteract the “myth of linguistic homogeneity” (Matsuda, 2006) in foundations writing classes, thus engaging students in conversations about multilingualism. Next, the presenters will introduce an activity in which students critically engage with their own ideas about “correctness” by analyzing grading rubrics and creating their own. Finally, participants will be invited to share and discuss their own ideas for class activities that can serve to address multilingualism.

4. Broadening Campus Conversations to Include Multilingual Students
This roundtable focuses on raising awareness about the presence of our multilingual students through linking them to prominent conversations on campus. Participants will (1) see an example of such a conversation that emerged from racial incidents at one campus, a conversation that both affected and marginalized international multilingual students, (2) discuss a project that brought these students’ voices and experiences to the campus response, and (3) identify conversations and potential projects at other institutions.

5. Academic Integrity as Institutional Imperative: Navigating the Plagiarism Reporting Process With/For Multilingual Students
This roundtable creates space for SLW specialists, administrators, and others to learn how to better advocate for multilingual students by analyzing official academic honesty/plagiarism policies from a variety of institutions, and by developing talking points for use with deans, honesty committees, and others. We will discuss policy evaluation criteria like generality, specificity, and flexibility. We will share strategies for clarifying expectations and articulating the complexities that multilingual students encounter as they learn to write from sources and avoid plagiarism.

(AW.06) Performing Corpus Analysis: Putting Corpus Findings Into Pedagogical Practice

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: Offers practice and principles for bringing corpus-based studies of academic discourse into writing instruction, including use of corpus insights for better understanding “academic” language.

Full description:

A great deal of writing research in recent years has used tools from corpus linguistics to identify patterns of language choices that are meaningful in discursive contexts, ranging from Biber et al.’s research on academic registers, to Hyland’s research on stance and positioning in disciplinary discourses, to Aull’s examination of language patterns in first-year students’ writing, to Lancaster’s corpus analysis of templates from Graff and Birkenstein’s textbook They Say, I Say. Despite this outpouring of research, however, writing practitioners need further assistance in (a) translating corpus findings into meaningful principles and tasks for writing students and (b) conducting their own corpus investigations, including principles for creating databases, or corpora, of writing and tools for carrying out analysis. This half-day workshop will offer participants a range of practiced perspectives for using the insights into language that corpus studies grant us, including how they can change our understanding of language, and for applying those insights to the writing classroom.

Speaker 1, in “Moving from corpus findings to teaching of ‘hedging’ and rhetorical positioning,” will discuss ways to bring into the classroom corpus-based insights into the language of academic writing without further perpetuating prescriptive, decontextualized (“good/bad”) views of writing—which is a real danger. The case study pursued here is that of “hedging,” defined as expressions of stance that reduce writers’ commitment to claims. We know from corpus studies that hedging is important for positioning arguments, and we have evidence that experts use more hedges than certainty expressions (Hyland), that upper-level students use more than first-year students (Aull & Lancaster), and that high-graded papers use more than lower-graded ones (Lancaster). Such findings, when presented without sensitivity to genre and situation, could fuel a prescriptive view that “hedging is good.” Working against this, the speaker will explore tasks on stance that help foster reflection and targeted inquiries, and will model activities that help students explore rhetorical functions of hedges in specific rhetorical contexts.

Speaker 2, in “Exploring tools for analyzing small corpora,” will demonstrate how free, online text analysis tools can be used to investigate the linguistic features of small researcher- or student-created corpora, and will invite participants to apply these tools to a small corpus that will be provided. (Participants must bring laptops.) Speaker 2 will describe two examples of pedagogical applications of small corpus analysis. The first is a current research project that compares end-of-semester portfolio reflections written by students at different stages in the FYC sequence at one institution. The second shows how students gained genre awareness by conducting corpus analysis of texts from different disciplinary genres. Finally, workshop participants will brainstorm ideas for using corpus analysis to address a range of research questions and classroom applications.

Speaker 3, in “Using corpus tools to identify expectations for student writing,” will show how corpus analysis of published work and student work can provide tools to illustrate expectations and diagnose where students fall short in meeting those expectations. Using data from Lancaster’s article on concession and counterarguments, we will compare those findings to students’ Researched Argument papers. After I briefly introduce AntConc, participants will work with a subset of argument papers to identify places where students perform or misperform the needed rhetorical moves for acknowledging and responding to other voices. The participants and presenters will analyze why those features exist and brainstorm ways the corpus tools can help students recognize those patterns and improve their arguments.

Speaker 4 will explore “Demystifying academic language: Myths vs. reality.” One of the functions of public education is to provide all students with access to academic language—the language of schooling. This construct, however, is often presented in abstract, general ways that become a barrier to students’ academic reading and writing. Using corpus findings (as presented by Biber, Gray, and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English), Speaker 4 will demystify academic writing through a description of its unique patterns (compression, elaboration, explicitness). Considering the fact that academic writing is the polar opposite of conversation/speech, the speaker will also suggest ways of bridging this gap between the two through the use of “popular” research/academic texts which include features of both registers.

Speaker 5, in “Functionally driven language patterns in narrative and newswriting,” will also draw heavily on the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language (Biber et al.), the first comprehensive corpus grammar of English, in describing differences in language patterns between narrative and news writing. Both are called “stories” in everyday speech, but the differences are substantial, including lexical density (information density), noun to verb ratios, tense and aspect, and types of subjects. Corpus studies give us substantial quantitative information about differences in texts, but they can’t by themselves provide qualitative explanations. Are these just surface differences, or are they motivated by the different work these genres enact? We will examine texts that seem prototypical, ask whether the patterns show up in those texts, and consider ways in which they are functionally motivated. Through group work and conversation, we will consider implications for teaching.

Speaker 6 will explore “Raising language awareness through hands-on exploration of COCA.” Teachers’ demonstrations or lectures on differences between informal conversational and scholarly written language can be a passive experience for students that may not translate into their making more effective choices in their own writing. Speaker 6 will take workshop participants through some simple hands-on exercises using COCA where students can explore sub-corpora in different registers such as soapies, fiction, and academic to find out for themselves whether prescriptive rules such as those against using contractions, personal pronouns, colloquial words like “kids,” and dialectal variants like “off of” are supported by the facts of real-world usage. Students can also upload a small sample of their own writing to measure the “academic strength” of their vocabulary choices against an academic sub-corpus. The aim of these exercises is to capitalize on our students’ familiarity with computer-based technologies, and spark their curiosity about the role of vocabulary and grammar in language.

(AW.07) The Choreography of Collaborative Coding

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: This workshop first offers an overview of the theory and practice of collaborative coding. Participants will then gain hands-on experience using the software program MAXQDA.

Full description:

As collaborative researchers on the Upward Project and co-authors of several publications on undergraduate research processes and perceptions, the leaders of this workshop will offer hands-on practice in collaborative coding through the lens of performance. In The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, Johnny Saldaña explains why qualitative researchers sometimes choose to code collaboratively: “Multiple minds bring multiple ways of analyzing and interpreting the data . . . Provocative questions are posed for consideration that could possibly generate new and richer codes” (27). Yet one of the major challenges of coding collaboratively is coordinating the efforts of multiple researchers, what might be thought of as a “choreography” of collaborative coding. It is work that involves the (hopefully graceful) coordination of many moving parts. Specifically, one or more choreographers must conceptualize and develop plans and protocols for how the performance will be carried out and why: What questions does the group bring to the project? What do they wish to explore? Why a group rather than a solo performer? What approaches to coding and kinds of codes best meet these aims and purposes?
As a research method, collaborative coding also allows for interpretive dissensus and a method for achieving a quantitative result. The speakers will first share their own experiences of reader dissensus through the lens of Louise Rosenblatt’s “poem as event,” (10) which posits the reader as the performer of a text and the performance itself as an event in time. This theory of reading typically applied to literature focuses our attention on stance; in this way participants will examine the stances they take when cued by a writer of any text and share their performances with their collaborators. In reflecting on their stance toward writerly cues, readers as researchers can better define the scope of agreement for a collaborative decision.
Conceiving reading as an event in time and the coding project as a choreographed performance, the result of collaborative coding is ideally like a troupe’s dance, combining individual interpretation and expression within a meaningful whole. As Elaine Richardson observes, though, performance is nonstandardized and irreplicable. If these attributes adhere to the idea of collaborative coding as a kind of performance, where does that leave collaborative coding in the tradition of RAD research? The workshop will end by addressing the implications of collaborative coding as performance.

Organization
Before the workshop, participants will be asked to download a free trial of MAXQDA software and watch the video tutorials. The workshop will begin with an intro to collaborative coding as performance and an exploration of the kinds of research questions it can answer. The next section will apply the lens of performance and provide an overview of a project’s stages and procedures. It will move to practice with sample texts and increase in complexity until participants are coding both individually and collaboratively using MAXQDA. Because coding is cognitively demanding, coding sessions will be short and a break will be scheduled between the coding blocks. Participants will leave the workshop with an understanding of collaborative coding’s goals and processes, its theoretical and technical applications, and the organizational demands it puts on a research team.

Schedule

1:30-2:00: All: Introduction to Collaborative coding as method: What kind of research questions can it answer?
2:00-2:30: Speaker 1: The choreography of collaborative coding: stages and procedures
2:30-3:00: Speaker 2: Reading as event: Participants code sample text; Intro to MAXQDA
3:00-3:15: Break
3:15-4:00: Speaker 3: Participants individually code using MAXQDA
4:00-4:30: Speaker 4: File sharing and collaboration in MAXQDA
4:30-5:00: Implications and Wrap-Up

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994.

Saldaña, Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London, UK: Sage, 2009.

(AW.08) Pedagogical Strategies for Increasing Student Self-Efficacy: Turning “No Can” into “Can Do”

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Participants will learn how to implement pedagogical strategies to increase student self-efficacy in the writing classroom.

Full description:

Many of our students come into the writing classroom with an attitude of they “can’t do writing.” While many instructors understand where the belief came from (poor prior performance, commentary from the past, an inadequate understanding of the tools and techniques required for success in writing, among others), the study of self-efficacy in the college classroom until recently has been slow. In fact, it wasn’t until 2010 that the first big data research was conducted in the FYC college classroom that determined that raising self-efficacy was possible and how that was accomplished. Even if an instructor knows what self-efficacy is and the role it plays in writing success, he or she may not have the tools with which to increase student self-efficacy. This workshop aims to fill that void.

This workshop brings together seasoned practitioners in the field of student self-efficacy to assist participants in developing pedagogy that enhances their own classroom practices and pedagogy and enables students to experience a rise in their own efficacy. The proposed layout of the workshop will begin with a description of self-efficacy from each presenter who will characterize agency/self-efficacy as they understand and activate it in their classes so that a range of ways to understand what self-efficacy is provided. Students need to be made overtly conscious of their own agency and self-efficacy demonstrating multiple viewpoints and techniques is paramount to success. Furthermore, each participant will offer context for the kinds of classes that they teach and the activities that are performed in the classes. Each discussion will be followed with breakout sessions to enable participants to share their own classroom pedagogies. Each breakout group will include one facilitator who will provide feedback. After each “round,” the groups will reconvene to report out and share what was discovered. The following is representative of the proposed schedule:

1:30 to 2:00 This introduction to self-efficacy will be hosted by each of the facilitators. Focus will be on self-efficacy: what it is; why it’s important; how it’s best used in the writing classroom. Theory will be emphasized with a working bibliography provided to all participants via Google Docs. This introduction will serve as a grounding for student self-efficacy and what it looks like in each facilitator’s classroom. (All Speakers, 30 minutes total)

2:00 to 3:00 In this section of the workshop, the facilitators will discuss practice and pedagogy. A Collaborative Activity Breakout Section or Learning by Doing where each facilitator will work with breakout groups to design small assignments and activities that are portable and sustainable. The facilitators will begin with a focus on what types of “small teaching” will best help students to increase their self-efficacy. Thereafter, the participants will be placed into small groups to share ideas and meet as collaborators and then reconvene with the larger group to report out. Facilitators will assist with this breakout session by rotating through the groups to ensure that attention is given to the topic. The purpose of this activity will be to provide “small teaching” moments that can be employed in daily classroom activities. (60 minutes)

3:00 to 3:15 Break (15 minutes)

3:15 to 4:15. In this section of the workshop, the facilitators will discuss the development of writing assignments with student self-efficacy in mind: What assignments work best; how to present assignments, etc.. This section of the workshop will feature a collaborative Activity Breakout Section or Learning by Doing where each facilitator will work with breakout groups to assist in the design of writing assignments and classroom activities that not only support the writing assignment but also are designed with student self-efficacy in mind. The facilitators will begin with a focus on what types of information raises student self-efficacy through the use of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (among other modalities). Thereafter, the participants will be placed into small groups to share ideas and meet as both collaborators and brainstormers and then will reconvene with the larger group to report out. Facilitators will assist with this breakout session by rotating through the groups to ensure that attention is given to the topic. The purpose of this activity will be to have the participants leave the workshop with a series of writing assignments that will assist students in building their self-efficacy. These assignments can then be employed by the participants in future courses. The participants’ take-away will be a collection of assignments that will help to build student self-efficacy. (60 minutes)

4:15 to 5:00 Wrap-up, “town hall” discussion, question and answers. (All Speakers, 45 minutes)

Participant requirements:
We recommend attendees bring laptops/tablets and a working syllabus. Participants will receive access to all documents and activities via Google Drive.

(AW.10) Quilting Composition: Performing Composition Pedagogy through Critical Quilt Making

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Participants in this hands-on workshop will quilt to explore its pedagogical usefulness for performing composing processes, encouraging cooperative argumentation, and doing social justice work.

Full description:

As rhetoric and composition continue to recognize critical making as useful to performing composition (Haas; Ratto and Boler; Shipka and Sheridan), how might we, as scholars and teachers in the field, practice pedagogy that critically engages these ideas? This workshop answers that call by challenging participants to reimagine composition through the practice of quilting. In this hands-on workshop, the Quilters will first introduce their experiences as part of an upper division undergraduate writing course that tasked students with performing composition, cooperative argumentation, and social justice through quilting. They will then lead participants in break-out groups where each person will make their own quilt block. These individual blocks will spark discussion about the composition process, collaboration, and group work in the rhetoric and composition classroom, and quilting composition as social justice.

Quilter One, an Assistant Professor of Composition Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), will open the workshop with an overview of her upper division composition course, “Cooperative Quilting.” In this class, Quilter One uses quilting to introduce students to cooperative argumentation, deliberative inquiry, and research and writing in the humanities and social sciences. Building on the work of Sonia Arellano, The Migrant Quilt Project, and Sewing for Social Justice, Quilter One argues that quilting is uniquely positioned as both an individual and collaborative method for performing composing processes and is conducive to individual and group dialogues about social justice and advocacy. Quilter One will discuss her experiences as the instructor of the course, including reactions from students and fellow faculty, and critical and pedagogical considerations. Finally, Quilter One will challenge assumptions about which bodies and whose bodies perform quilting by linking her approach to quilting as composition to rasquachismo (Ybarra-Frausto) through her identity as a Chicanx woman who had no experience as a quilter before this project.

Quilter Two, Quilter One’s student, discusses her role in the quilting project and creating her own quilt piece, or “block.” She reflects on how making the quilt is both stimulating and insightful as it asks individuals who have similar and different opinions to come together to create new ideas. Through her observations, she notes that quilting challenges thought processes as participants work to figure out how to best represent ideas important to them. Quilter Two will summarize her experiences and observations before leading a quilting group. Quilter Two expects that participants in this workshop will most likely change their ideas multiple times before choosing a representation, and as they quilt they will see that the outcome may not become an exact replica of what they imagined. She will use this to help spark a conversation about the composition process and encourage workshop participants to think critically about quilting as composition.

Quilter Three, also a student of Quilter One, will speak about her experience quilting in class. She will focus on her initial impressions of the project, including doubts and fears from the student perspective of being tasked with such an undertaking. Her discussion will cover her success despite not having any prior sewing experience to help make the quilt, and the challenges she faced along the way while sewing. Apart from the individual sewing tasks, she will also cover group and class dynamic and how disagreements about the quilt were settled. She will use these observations to discuss how the quilt helped develop her dialogic and ethical communication and cooperation through group quilting. Once the introduction concludes, she will help participants in her group sew, cut, measure, and fuse textiles, teach them the different dimensions of the quilt (front, back, batting), and help with questions participants may have about the project.

Quilter Four will approach the project as a researcher and respondent. She will provide a deeper understanding of how textiles function as technical documents (Haas; West-Pucket), and the history of textiles as testimonio in indigenous communities across Latin America. This connection helps ground Quilter One’s project as a decolonial Latinx feminist approach to teaching composition, especially in the context of CSUMB, a Hispanic Serving Institution. Using her experience as a farmworker to connect embodied practice to performative research, Quilter Four will show how innovative pedagogies which respond to the lived experiences of the student population encourage students to value the historically undermined epistemologies they bring into the classroom. Quilter Four will argue that quilting composition, reimagined as decolonial Latinx feminism, goes beyond traditional multimodality to connect bodies and lives through performance and production.

Workshop Schedule (half-day Wednesday afternoon session):

1:30-2:30: Introduction to Critical Quilting
In the first hour, Quilter One will give a theoretical and pedagogical introduction to critical quilt making as composition. Her discussion will include an overview of her experience designing and instructing an upper division composition course that engages quilting as pedagogy. Handouts which include a sample syllabus, quilting resources, and bibliography will be provided. Quilters Two and Three will speak about their experiences as students of the course, and the impact it had on their scholarly development. Quilter Four will discuss the project from a researcher’s perspective, focusing on how performative projects require performative research practices.

2:30-4:00: Critical Quilting Groups
After introducing the project, each Quilter will host a break-out group of participants in creating individual quilt blocks that represent their scholarly identities. All materials will be provided by the Quilters, who will lead participants in a variety of quilting practices to help them produce their quilt block, including an introduction to measuring, cutting, stitching, fusing (the no-sew method!), and other quilting considerations. No quilting experience necessary! Quilters will share their expertise and assist participants in creating their quilt blocks.

4:00-5:00: Discussion and Reflection
The last hour will ask that participants reflect on the process of creating their own quilt block and how they connect their critical making to composition theory and practice. It will also include a discussion of the challenges, risks, rewards, and other considerations of engaging quilting as composition pedagogy.

(AW.12) Teach it Like We Mean It: Helping Students Perform Their Power in Peer Review

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This highly interactive workshop will disrupt standard peer review practice with a goal to support participants’ design or revision of one peer review assignment.

Full description:

Since the social turn in composition studies, asking students to engage in collaborative peer review and response has become standard practice in the writing classroom. We require it. We praise it. We believe in it. And we should. Many composition scholars (Bruffee, Gere, and Nelson, to name a few) have illustrated that peer review can be a meaningful collaborative learning activity for students. In fact, Reid claims that peer review “is not just an assignment in a writing class; it’s the assignment that best encapsulates what we want writers to do after they leave our class” (219). Despite our assumed belief in the value of peer review, the practice is often ineffective and unimaginative. Our experience as writing instructors and WPAs has shown us that while many instructors claim to value peer review, few utilize the process to its full potential.

The problem, as we see it, is that students often act as inauthentic performers–they write, critique, and revise in a way they think will impress their instructor. Further, students often have a complicated relationship to their own authority in their writing and review habits (Walvoord and McCarthy; Schneider and Andre). We understand why—peer review is a complex series of tasks, of giving and receiving, of critiquing and responding, that have become problematically simplified and teacher-centric, and in negotiating those expectations students often default to pleasing the instructor—but this isn’t a fait accompli. Together, we can rethink how peer review is presented, and make it the heart of the composition classroom rather than an add-on.

This highly interactive workshop will help instructors disrupt standard peer review practice. We will start the day with a group discussion of the ways that students perform peer review, considering the following questions together:

-How do students perform peer review?
-How do teachers perform peer review?
-On what assumptions/beliefs do students and teachers base this performance?
-How does this performance help or hinder student feedback and revision?
-How do we know if our peer review performances are working?

This discussion will set the foundation for the question that will guide the rest of the workshop: How do we help students move beyond their current performances to develop agency and authenticity as peer reviewers?

Using participant peer review assignments to ground our work, we will rethink how to teach peer review as a genre that is rhetorically situated. We will discuss different models for peer review, such as teaching peer review as a genre of writing with a particular purpose, audience, and rhetorical work, using full-class workshops to make the work of feedback public and open, and how to assess student learning through peer review. The goal is of our conversation is to support participants’ design or revision of one peer review assignment.

Finally, we will put our discussion of peer review methodologies into context with current research trends, and discuss the potential for new publications that could arise from the new peer review activities our participants will have developed. We will ask participants to think through assignment goals, how they might collect evidence of whether or not they accomplished that goal, and how they might report what they find to their programs or to the wider field.

Workshop Outcomes

1. Participants will identify ways to introduce and contextualize the work of peer review for student writers and develop strategies to situate peer review within the academy.

2. Participants will be introduced to models of peer review that go beyond the in-class activity, including teaching peer review as a genre, full-class workshops, and assessing learning through peer review.

3. Participants will develop and problematize peer review strategies that prioritize effective and inclusive classroom practices.

4. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop and revise at least one existing peer review assignment with their peers, or create a new assignment that can then be implemented in their classes.

5. Participants will design assessments of their new peer review assignments that will help them know if peer review is doing the work they want it to do in the classroom.

6. Participants will leave with a brief bibliography overviewing peer review scholarship and a shared group-created list of possible areas for peer review research and collaborations.

7. Participants will receive handouts and links to videos and other multimodal peer review resources.

Workshop Schedule

1:30-1:45: Introductions

1:45-2:30: Discussion: Unpacking Student Performance in Peer Review
How do we characterize student performance in peer review? How does it affect peer review? Where does it come from?

2:30-3:00: Introducing Students to the Work of Peer Review: Contextualizing and Sharing
How do we introduce students to the work of peer review? How do we frame this work? How do we establish the importance? How do we model this work? In this section, we present participants with peer review models derived from our own classroom practice and research. Participants will also engage in annotating and roleplay to explore and critique these models.

3pm: Short Break

3:15pm-4:15pm: Transforming our Peer Review Practice: Considering New Models
What are different models of performing peer review in the classroom? How can we revise our peer review activities to align with our expectations of students? How can we create peer review assignments that are more accessible and inviting to students? In this section, participants will share peer review assignments they bring to the workshop with a small group and will workshop them with input from one of the panelists.

4:15-5:00: Discussion: Implementing, Assessing, and Studying Peer Review Practices
How can we sustain an intentional peer review pedagogy? How can we assess our peer review practices? What peer review resources are available to instructors? How can our peer review work contribute to research?

(AW.13) Shut up and Listen!: Speaking truth to power (2-hr Ignite Talk Workshop)

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop intends to generate both theory and pedagogy to undo systemic educational injustice and devise strategic plans for implementation at varying institutions.

Full description:

As writing center scholars begin to look at ways to make writing centers a more inclusive space for historically marginalized people, and also include more historically marginalized people in writing center scholarship, they must recognize that the goal of inclusion is not sufficient. Directors, tutors, and staff, then, must also work to actively dismantle the normalized systemic oppression (white supremacy), which still continues to silence, ignore, and delegitimize certain groups of people as well as their experiences. They must learn to listen to the experiences of these underserved people and see those experiences not only as valid, but also true and not in need of (whitesplaining). As such, this ignite talk is invites people who are willing to share their stories as historically marginalized people in the writing center in an effort to: 1) bring insight to the ways the writing center pedagogies and theories have both included historically marginalized people and—perhaps unwittingly—excluded them; 2) highlight the ways allyship fails; 3) emphasize the need for accomplices and 4) create plans of action buttressed by accomplices, mentors and like minded supporters. This ignite talk is in five parts:
Part I: Voices from the margins (20 minutes)
In Part I, scholars from historically marginalized populations, i.e. race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. share their experiences working a writing center. These experiences include but are not limited to stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, bureaucratic red tape, hiring practices, etc.
After Part I, there is a ten-minute break where those identifying as from the dominant culture or as writing center directors, etc. reflect and write down their thoughts and questions in response to Part I (10 minutes).
Part II: Power has a say (20 minutes)
In Part II, writing center directors and scholars identifying as from the dominant culture share their experiences with historically marginalized students in the writing center, as well as discuss the ways in which the have consciously attempted to make a more (or less) inclusive writing center. These experiences could include but are not limited to hiring practices, tutor pedagogies, tutor preparatory class, etc.
After Part II, there is a ten-minute break where historically marginalized participants reflect and write down their thoughts and questions in response to Part II (10 minutes).
Part III: Responding to shared stories (30 minutes)
In Part III, participants will break into groups and share their questions and responses to the stories each person shared. These questions and responses function not only as a way to value stories and the experiences of those who work in the writing center, but also as an exchange of ideas where we begin to form ways to implement tangible change in the writing center.
Part IV: Tangible Change (30 minutes)
In Part IV, groups will share what they learned listening these stories and discuss the types of tangible changes they decided to attempt to implement within their own writing centers, writing center scholarship, or writing center pedagogy. This activity also works as an exchange of ideas as more groups share their plans for tangible change.
Part V: Forging Bonds (10 minutes)
This work is hard, but the road can be less bumpy with accomplices providing encouragement, support and a voice when yours isn’t loud enough. In Part V, individuals will be prompted to one more force of action. Participants will be asked to truly commit to actively demonstrating their accompliceship by connecting with, and exchanging contact info with those they relate to. The hope here is to foster supportive relationships that help keep the work going, and get it done.

CCCC 2019: Wednesday Morning Workshops

Morning Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

(MW.01) Performing Prison: Intentional Teaching, Research, and Writing Inside & Out

Sponsored by: Teaching in Prison: Pedagogy, Research, and Literacies Collective Standing Group

Level: 4-year

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: We engage in interactive discussions of prison teaching, group activity and reflection, and a session in which we engage with the voices of incarcerated writers.

Full description:

Scholars of writing pedagogy have been using performance studies as a way to rethink what it means to write, to teach and to learn writing, and to engage in classroom discussions, as well as to refocus our understanding of positionality. Applying work in performance studies to our scenes of writing enables us to destabilize not only our understanding of grammar, form, and “English” but also of classroom and institutional hierarchies and of modes of learning. As teachers and students of writing, we are challenged to reconceive our understandings of what is “correct” and what is “complete,” to rethink pedagogy’s power relations and modes of discourse, and to recognize the roles of empathy, Kairos, and spontaneity in the classroom. Students too are increasingly more willing to challenge our modes of engagement with them and our understanding of best practices in pedagogy; they often perform various kinds of resistance to our texts, our assignments, and our disciplinary (in all senses of the word) processes in ways that previous generations of students were less likely to do.

In carceral situations, however, pedagogical performance works differently. The power to enable and engage in play, spontaneity, and disruption of forms and hierarchies is to a great extent taken out of the hands of instructors and students and used by the institution as a way to control instructors and students. The prison system itself has control over all essential elements of the classroom: entry into the space, writing and researching materials, the length of the class, the texts, and even the content of student work; furthermore, prison administrators may have very different ideas from teachers and students of the learning outcomes and the use value of a writing course, and they may choose to disrupt, control, or curtail the course in various ways. This absolute power combined with the banality of bureaucratic processes means teachers and students are subject to the chilling effects from this control and must thus find ways to perform obedience while also engaging each other in more covert forms of play, disruption, and kairotic spontaneity. Our workshop will examine the range of ways that writing and rhetoric scholars and their students perform prison work, along with the theories (of prison pedagogy, performance, and writing studies) that inform those performances. Through a combination of engaged table talks, discussions, and interactive activities, we hope to invigorate and stretch our understanding of prison pedagogy and research and reinsert resistance.

Our workshop participants are typically a combination of those new to prison teaching and those who have engaged with it both inside and outside of prison walls, including the following:
• inside: teaching SAE and credited composition courses, sponsoring artistic and theatrical performance, facilitating creative writing, tutoring, offering courses and workshops grounded in texts and social concerns, etc.
• outside: performing and circulating writing and art, hosting community dialogues, circulating public and scholarly narratives that challenge stereotypes of prisoners, prison workers, and material conditions, etc.

In previous workshops, we have used more traditional formats to promote what have always been fruitful discussions of the ways in which we design and follow through on this work, its successes and its failures. Our 2019 workshop will use a much more interactive format as we consider the challenges of our performances within the system of justice in the United States. Participants will join three small group table talks, perform a prison solidarity dance and reflection, and offer feedback to currently incarcerated writers. In using this new format, our goal is to transform prison work through the immediate actions of those in the room and to engage directly with the work of our incarcerated students.

Schedule & Meeting Space Requests

We request a medium-size meeting room; we also request a morning time slot for this Wednesday half-day workshop.

Schedule of Events:

9:00-9:30 Welcome, introductions, and opening collaborative dance built from movements and gestures of those who cannot be in the room and based upon work developed by dance faculty who work with prisoners.

9:30-9:40: Active Listening & Reflecting: Participants hear recorded voices of writers in prison and respond on feedback postcards

9:40-10:15: Table Talk Session #1: Prison Writing/Rhetoric Research (3 five minute presentations on topic followed by table talk)
• Speaker 1: If You Knew Your History: Performing Historical Research in Carceral Contexts
• Speaker 2: “Participatory Action Research from the Inside-Out”
• Speaker 3: Incarcerated Activists and the Available Means of Literacy

10:15-10:45: Table Talk Session #2: University-Prison Partnerships (3 five minute presentations on topic followed by table talk)
• Speaker 4: How Can I Imagine Where Have You Been?
• Speaker 5: Preparing to Go Inside on the Outside: Cultivating Allies and Advocates
• Speaker 6: “Clearing the Path, Creating Change”

10:45-11:00: Break

11:00-11:30: Speaker 7 leads a session featuring her Inside-Out course on Protest Writing and Rhetoric, a course in which student study and create protest speeches, zines, fiction and poetry, and group manifestos. By having workshop participants engage with and respond to speeches, zines, and manifestos at their tables, this session will help us rethink ways we perform traditional and alternative pedagogies and enable cross-cultural dialogue about protest, solidarity, and the rhetoric of performance itself.

11:30-12:00 Table Talk Session #3: Prison Pedagogy and Teaching (3 five minute presentations on topic followed by table talk)

• Speaker 8: “English Professor or Poetry Coach?”
• Speaker 9 and 10: “Notes Toward an Inside Writing Clinic”
• Speaker 11: “Envisioning Justice: Writing and Art”

12:00-12:15 Bringing intentional practice to inside/out prison work (Respondent)

12:15-12:30 Performing Prison: a closing reflection activity and group action plans

(MW.02) Transforming Failure into Effective Advocacy: A Workshop on Performing Community Leadership

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop offers an opportunity for participants to develop strategies and a support network for more effective advocacy, leadership, and community-engaged work.

Full description:

This workshop offers an opportunity for participants to develop strategies and a support network for more effective advocacy, leadership, and community-engaged work. Our workshop draws from key concepts in community literacy studies to offer a performative space for rethinking “failed attempts” at advocacy and community leadership.

Community literacy theory calls for rhetorical action, for rhetors to not simply describe what it means to be a leader or advocate, but to perform rhetorical work that is accountable to a community’s needs and interests. When engaging in such performances, especially for the first time, failure is often inevitable, and failed attempts are easily cast aside. This workshop invites participants to reflect on their failed attempts at advocacy in a collaborative, performative space of inquiry. We welcome participants who have experience—or hope to gain experience—doing advocacy in university settings, in community organizations, in professional organizations, and more.

Our inspiration for this workshop comes from composition pedagogy, which acknowledges that students’ failures provide rich tools for their growth and development as writers. This stance, we maintain, is equally or even more important in our own leadership and advocacy work, where the stakes of rhetorical performance are high and where there are typically fewer opportunities for “revision.” Just as our students need supportive environments through which they can experience and process failure, this workshop offers a space for instructors, WPAs, community leaders, and scholars doing community-based work to “set up a dialogue with failure” (Daloz Parks). We foreground failure in an effort to demonstrate how less-than-successful advocacy performances can reveal opportunities for intercultural inquiry and transformative learning.

Goals for this workshop:
-Offer theory and research that can serve as a heuristic guide for more effective leadership and advocacy.
-Provide scenarios of “failed advocacy” that can be used as instructive case examples.
-Create a space for participants to reflect on their own experiences and practice performing new styles of leadership and advocacy.
-Connect participants to a support network of others who are facing leadership and advocacy challenges.

The workshop will focus on three common challenges in community-based work and include short presentations, performances of “failed attempts,” and breakout discussion sessions with skilled facilitators. For each challenge, a speaker will first talk about their experience with that problem, illustrate a “failed attempt” to address it, and show how they used a concept from community literacy studies to process that failure productively. Following each presentation, there will be breakout sessions with participants to share their own cases and have the opportunity to get feedback from facilitators and other participants.

Challenge 1: Making change when you do not have institutional authority.
This speaker will present a case study of a group of graduate students who lead a strategic planning effort at their university in the city of Pittsburgh. Speaker 1 will analyze some of the student group’s early, failed attempts at community engagement in order to show how a distinction between holding formal authority and performing “adaptive leadership” can be used to lead more effectively (Heifetz). One finding from this case study is that strategic planning in higher education often invites technical solutions that can obscure more complex institutional problems; such efforts thus require a better understanding of how to identify and define adaptive challenges. By offering concrete examples of technical versus adaptive problems, this presentation invites participants to analyze their own failed cases through the lens of adaptive leadership and look for new ways to understand that went wrong.

Challenge 2: Leading diverse groups when people have conflicting goals for the cause or organization.
Speaker 2 will present on how they used the concept of “rivaling” as a tool for intercultural inquiry in their work with a summer literacy program that aims to empower rural Appalachian girls through digital storytelling (Flower, Long, and Higgins). One of the main challenges this program faced was negotiating the diverse perspectives and competing goals of its leadership team and the Appalachian community members they were striving to serve. Speaker 2 will show how using the concept of rivaling helped to reveal that stakeholders in the program were operating from different, and sometimes conflicting, understandings of “empowerment.” Ultimately, Speaker 2 will show how rivaling allowed them to examine how a literacy initiative situated in the tradition of the Foxfire books and Stephen Gilbert Brown’s work with Athabascan students supports the rhetorical performances of rural girls and the key challenges it faces in doing so.

Challenge 3: Advocating effectively when your community’s needs are unfamiliar, unclear, or complex.
Speaker 3 will present on the obstacles they faced when supporting the rhetorical work of parents who advocate on behalf of their disabled children within the public education system. One of the challenges the speaker encountered was that parent faced unique rhetorical challenges, which current community literacy and advocacy models seem less able to describe. Speaker 3 will demonstrate one approach for listening to/for communities whose advocacy needs are not well-known using the “story behind the story” (Flower, Community Literacy) strategy as a form of both engagement and support. While the speaker initially used this strategy to build a foundation for a local public that might draw people into dialogue, parents’ stories and the logic behind them called into question the extent to which “public dialogue” could support and meet their advocacy needs. Speaker 3 will show how the story behind the story strategy illuminated complex challenges, transforming this “failed” advocacy attempt into an opportunity to develop more inclusive approaches to advocacy and community engagement.

Since a main goal of the workshop is to provide space for participants to reflect on their own leadership and advocacy efforts, we invite participants to come prepared with their own stories of “failed” attempts to workshop. Through our breakout sessions, facilitators will provide collaborative planning support for processing those experiences. At the end of the session, we will introduce an opportunity for participants to stay connected as part of an ongoing network of support.

(MW.03) Responding to Anti-Intellectualism in the Classroom: Developing Positive Emotions and Facilitating Student Engagement

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop provides strategies for mitigating anti-intellectualism in the classroom by enhancing student engagement, fostering positive emotions, and cultivating a culture of learning.

Full description:

In this Rhetoricians for Peace SIG workshop, we provide strategies for rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers to address the rise of anti-intellectualism sentiment and public mistrust of expert opinion within and beyond the classroom. The 2016 United States presidential election result is the most recent case study of anti-intellectualism sentiment that has far-reaching consequences: a 2016 Pew Research poll found that 64% of Americans believe “fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events” (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016). Anti-intellectualism, through propagation of fake news and misleading rhetoric, had played a significant role in the outcome of the election. Post-election, it seemed like society would have embraced intellectualism and education as an informed response, but this did not come to pass. As teachers, we have now two choices: to avoid the problem entirely or to engage it head-on through activities and conversations focused on promoting meaningful student engagement through dialogue across difference, critical inquiry, rhetorical analysis, research skills, and information literacy. This work is not without its difficulties: encouraging a culture of learning in the classroom starts with student engagement, developing student agency, and fostering positive student emotions (Laverghetta, 2015). To that end, our workshop will be driven by the following questions that we ask: (1) How do we help students see education as a means to intellectual activity? (2) How do we foster learned agency (as opposed to learned helplessness) in the classroom? (3) How do we develop activities and assignments that encourage positive emotions among students?

9:00-9:10: Welcome to the Workshop

9:10-9:40: Keynote: Suspecting Expertise: Anti-Intellectualism and Rugged Individualism in American History

To frame our understanding of how American anti-intellectualism impacts present-day composition and communication curriculum and pedagogy, we begin our workshop with an American historian whose research focuses on the cultural authority of expert knowledge in popular, medical, and legal contexts. This talk moves beyond ideas about anti-intellectualism to highlight the power dynamics underlying expertise, who defines it, and who can claim its mantle in a culture that privileges cultural values, such as the self-made man, rugged individualism, and economic self-interest (Hofstadter, 1966; Jacoby, 2009). These cultural values undermine the authority of learned experts and their institutions in favor of self-knowing in ways that contribute to enduring suspicion of professors and learning in present-day classrooms. These historical contexts inform roundtable discussions by (1) revealing a longer history of anti-intellectualism in the US and the cultural values underpinning it and (2) providing participants with a longer historical foundation for constructively problem-solving and addressing these beliefs through assignments and class discussions.

9:45-10:15: Keynote: Understanding Engagement: Attitudes, Assumptions, and Anti-intellectualism in the Classroom

In light of the history of anti-intellectualism presented by our first keynote speaker, a rhetoric and composition scholar will engage workshop participants in an activity designed to help them better understand their students’assumptions about intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in a contemporary context. Participants will be asked to draw visual representations of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, as they define the terms. After a brief analysis of participants’ drawings, the speaker will show a few representative examples of her students’ drawings and share how an understanding of students’ assumptions about literacy and learning can inform classroom practices and curricula (Bradbury, 2016). The conversation that ensues will inform the roundtable discussions by (1) helping participants better understand contemporary beliefs about intellectualism and anti-intellectualism and (2) aiding participants in recognizing the important differences between their own and their students’ experiences regarding learning and education.

10:15-10:25: Break

10:25-10:30: Brief orientation to the roundtables

10:35-11:00: Roundtables: Fostering Positive Emotions and Student Engagement in the Composition and Communication Classroom

Participants will further develop ideas from the morning session in thematic roundtables, specifically focused on conversation and strategies about how to facilitate positive emotions and student engagement within course curriculum, curriculum design, faculty development, and community engagement. Drawing inspiration from Seligman et al.’s (2004) character strengths and virtues, Well-Being Theory (2011), and the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011), participants should leave with ideas for an activity or assignment that helps students in diverse settings foster PERMA: (1) positive emotions, (2) engagement, (3) positive relationships with others, (4) finding meaning, and (5) developing accomplishments. In particular, this roundtable will generate ideas and conversations about using a strengths-based approach to critical discourse and its connection to writing and well-being in resisting learned helplessness, encouraging student engagement and building positive emotions through community-based experiences in the two-year college and other environments, and assessing the history of American anti-intellectualism and expert authority and its impact on building positive emotions. This roundtable will provide participants with the tools needed to lead local faculty through professional development. After 20 minutes of small group roundtable discussions, participants will return to share ideas with all workshop participants.

11:00-11:20: Reporting out on roundtable discussions

11:20-11:30: Break

11:30-11:35: Brief orientation to the second roundtable

11:35-12:00: Roundtables: Students’ Identities, Instructors’ Personalities, and Building Community in the Classroom

Building on the takeaways from the keynotes and first roundtable, participants will further develop their ideas to address classroom practices that consider how students’ identities and instructors’ personalities should be considered to cultivate classroom community, to facilitate mutual respect across differences, and to overcome the resistance to pedagogy that may stem from anti-intellectual attitudes. The root causes of anti-intellectualism, such as class background and estrangement from academic discourse, must be accounted for when developing critical classrooms. However, many of the attempts to usher in critically-informed discourse further entrench students into beliefs and stances that support anti-intellectualism. In these roundtables, participants should leave the roundtable with strategies to talk about and teach transformative classroom practices, such as game-play, discourse patterns, identity construction, classroom management, and dialogue across difference to initiate rhetorical listening and create a more engaged and trusting classroom culture. While developing strategies, participants will also consider and practice ways they might ask faculty at their local institutions to engage in similar activities. After 20 minutes of roundtable discussion, participants will return to share ideas with all workshop participants.

12:00-12:30: Reporting out and concluding workshop

(MW.04) Engaging the Global: Performing Translingual/Transmodal Pedagogies in Writing Classrooms

Sponsored by: Transnational Composition Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This workshop provides participants with specific pedagogical strategies to help leverage students’ home literacies as learning resources and to foster translingual disposition and performance.

Full description:

In the 2019 CCCC call for proposals, Vershawn Ashanti Young calls for the field to consider how performance can foster a “translingual orientation” to language and literacy. In response to this call, the Transnational Writing Workshop will bring together participants–writing teachers, researchers, and program administrators— from an array of institutions and regions of the world to explore ways of theorizing and enacting performance-based pedagogies with a translingual focus. For the past four years the workshop has “engaged the global” and transformed composition studies through the cultivation of professional relationships, conversations, and partnership among teachers/scholars of writing in the US and around the world. In the fifth edition of this workshop, we propose to continue working towards these aims in our exploration of innovative approaches that incorporate students’ translingual (or multilingual) and transmodal (or multimodal) performances as resources in writing classrooms, programs, and higher educational structures.

Central to the translingual focus is a challenge to monolingual norms and orientations in an effort to shift multilingual students from deficit positions. This move towards an asset-based approach leverages students’ home languages and literacies as key resources for teaching and learning. Critically, while a growing body of scholarship increasingly focuses on this area, there is still a need to understand how to enact such pedagogies as more embodied, holistic, and performance-based approaches. In order to work towards these aims, this workshop will engage participants in hands-on activities, assignments, and ideas led by a broad range of teacher-scholars from diverse regions of the world, including Turkey, China, Hungary, India, and the US. In total 27 facilitators (note: a number of projects are collaborative) at six different tables will ask participants to engage in workshop activities focused on translingual approaches to teaching writing. In particular the workshops will be organized around the following four areas:

1.First Year Writing (FYW). Activities in this area will focus on translingual pedagogies in FYW classrooms.

-Examining code meshing and the ways translingual texts “do” a different kind of literacy, as a set of performative moves motivating students to negotiate meaning differently.

-Exploring strategies for fostering meta-awareness and reflection on translingual and transmodal literacy practices (e.g., the creation of visual maps and drawings to foster reflection).

-Engaging in “translation” assignments in which students are asked to translate texts in their home languages into other languages and for other audiences.

-Examining contrastive and comparative approaches to global rhetorics: comparing gender representations and differing perspectives on women’s veiling through studies of popular media in other languages and cultures; comparing rhetorical tropes and styles in American and Chinese blog posts.

-Exploring ways that producing and performing creative writing pieces (e.g., poetry, autoethnography) can be used to teach and foster translingual dispositions and practices.

-Creating e-portfolios for translingual students.

2. Multimodality. This area will attend to transmodal performances grounded in the conception of language as one resource in a wider rhetorical repertoire.

-Exploring activities focused on translingual mobile gaming practices.

-Examining community engagement and service learning in multilingual communities (e.g., conducting oral history interviews and spatially mapping the narratives using Google maps).

-Incorporating “remix” and multimodal assignments into classes with multilinguals (.e.g. remixing literacy narratives into videos).

-Designing multimodal children’s story books for translingual readers.

3. Transnational Writing Program Administration/Curriculum Development. This area will focus on developing translingual workshops, learning communities, and training sessions in transnational contexts.

-Examining the ways that complex local institutional, linguistic, and cultural logics mediate the implementation and design of an English curriculum in a Turkish university in Northern Cyprus and a university in Southwest China.

-Creating a bilingual learning community and curricula in a Hispanic serving institution (HIS) in which students’ home languages (i.e., Spanish) and English are deeply interwoven throughout the courses and program.

-Facilitating collaborative online learning projects between North American and international partners, including at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.

-Designing a faculty learning community that promotes translingualism and community engagement, incorporating examples of work with local organizations in the Rio Grande Valley to respond to linguistic realities and foster language awareness and academic engagement.

-Designing materials and translingual writing workshops for teachers and tutors at a community college.

4. Professional Writing. This area will attend to professional writing and communication projects and activities that involve writing in globalized professional spaces.

-Engaging students in redesign of an American product and design for a “foreign market” with which they are unfamiliar.

-Responding to job advertisements and developing resumes for opportunities outside the United States, while looking at conventions of CVs written in Spanish, Korean, and French to surface linguistic and cross-cultural frames.

-Examining a transnational collaboration in a technical communication course between universities in the U.S. and Hungary focusing on the creation of professional personas in cross-cultural contexts.

The workshop is organized in three stages: (1) a brief introductory session, (2) table rotations, and (3) full group reflection. The table-rotation format includes two major rounds of concurrent, activity-focused sessions at six tables with 4-5 facilitators each. During the final reflection, participants will highlight their key takeaways relevant for their local contexts.

In the weeks leading up to the workshop, the participants will be able to preview the workshop by accessing facilitators’ activity-based workshop materials shared in a web repository. The four co-chairs, as active users of social media platforms, will engage facilitators, registered participants, and other members of the profession in promotion and conversations about the workshop and its theme before, during, and after the workshop.

By bringing together writing teacher-scholars from various locations, the workshop is intended to promote dialogue across institutional, geographic, and linguistic borders. Our proposed workshop will provide a space for this exchange through hands-on learning activities that will enable participants to walk away with specific teaching and administrative strategies to challenge monolingual perspectives and foster translingual dispositions and performances in the context of 21st century globalization.

(MW.05) What Happens After Kansas City?: Anti-Racist Activism in Composition

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This workshop uses exercises from Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed to examine white supremacy in composition.

Full description:

When the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication decided to forge ahead with its conference in Kansas City, Missouri last year, there were some members who chose not to attend. Some people argued that the NAACP’s travel advisory was a strong argument to cancel or move the conference from Missouri where Michael Brown was killed by police in 2015; student protests against the racist culture at the University of Missouri, Columbia forced the resignation of the president; and, most recently, a new law would require the plaintiff to carry the burden of proof for a case of racial discrimination.

Some faculty members of color decided that traveling to Missouri was too physically and emotionally risky, and they boycotted. Some racially privileged members decided that they would stand in alliance with the Black Caucus, Latinx Caucus, American Indian Caucus, Asian/Asian American Caucus, and Queer Caucus, and they boycotted. Others chose to attend and stand in alliance with local activists who were fighting racism and police brutality. The online wiki Four Days in Kansas City gave many academics a space to discuss what they chose to do last year and why (fourdaysinkansascity.org).

However, in the wake of this rupture in academic culture, we still need to grapple publically and bodily with the web of white supremacy in composition: at CCCCs, in our institutions, in our departments, and in our classrooms. This workshop goes to the very crux of inequity: the pervasive and persistent white supremacy that plays out – often agent-less, but occasionally with clear agents — in higher education. We will use exercises from Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) to step into this potent moment.

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed approaches are rarely presented at CCCCs, but they allow for surprising insights and unusual connections to happen while combining the traditions of intellectual engagement with kinesthetic learning and reflection. We will set this up as a call-and-response. The call involves the workshop leaders sharing their stories; the response involves some performative task asked of the participants. Together, workshop leaders and participants will reflect on the exchanges and risk telling many truths. Several of the leaders of this workshop are new and underrepresented voices and have not presented at CCCCs before, but they have many years of teaching experience and much to say about white supremacy in composition.

This workshop will bring the outrage about where we are into a space where we can share stories, listen with open hearts, and organize for future change in our discipline.

This workshop will create an unsafe space for the performance of white supremacy and rupture the smooth masculinist narratives of collegiality and elitism.

This workshop is not interested in where you earned your degree/s, but wants to know if you are down for the revolution.

This workshop will get you out of your mind full of grading and to-do lists and into your body–with its beauty, its emotions, and the wounds from white supremacy.

This workshop will have you doing as much movement as writing, as much talking as listening, and as much dancing as planning.

This workshop will cut through the treacle of progressive narratives of education and “workforce development” while refusing to support mythologies of noblesse oblige.

This workshop will crack you open to the stories of the violated and dispossessed within our discipline and our classrooms.

You’re already doing the work, right? So join us.

Schedule
9-9:30 Introductions and warm up exercises
9:30-9:45 First performance by facilitator one
9:45-10 Group PTO exercise
10-10:15 Second performance by facilitator two
10:15-10:30 Writing exercise
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11 Third performance by facilitator three
11-11:15 PTO exercise
11:15-11:30 Writing exercise
11:30-11:45 Fourth performance by group on the lure of whiteness
11:45-12 Small group work
12-12:30 Groups perform/act out/read out

(MW.06) Podcasting in the Composition Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This workshop:

* Explores the benefits of creating sound artifacts in composition classrooms;

* Modifies used assignments for new (your!) contexts;

* Creates meaningful sound artifacts.

Full description:

Are you or your students avid podcast listeners? Are you addicted to The Moth, Serial, 99 Percent Invisible, Radiolab, or This American Life? How about Alice Isn’t Dead?

This workshop unearths the ways that translating text into sound allows students to heuristically examine their scholastic work from both new production and new audience perspectives.

There is significant research (for example the 2010 work of Ambrose, S.A. et al., and the 2006 work of Anderson, Atkins, Ball, Homicz Millar, Selfe and Selfe, among others) showing that multimodal activities in composition classrooms are a strong tool for teaching, reinforcing rhetorical skills and an understanding of genre/disciplinarity, and increasing student motivation; however, student-created audio is still relatively rare in composition classrooms, despite the surge in popularity that podcasts are currently experiencing.

This workshop aims to bring the multimodal design lessons found in the production of audio essays to a significantly broader audience by demonstrating how to use Audacity, (a free, open-source, cross platform audio editing application that allows users to manage large audio projects) to guide students through the audio production process in composition classes. While Audacity has a full suite of audio editing and production tools, its user interface facilitates significant production with just a few minutes of guided introduction. By focusing on the structure of assignments and the utilization of free and open source software and audio resources, this workshop is not only useful but applicable by anyone with access to a computer and internet connection. While we understand that this may not be the case for all students, all the time, the standardization of computer classrooms across most schools does afford some level of audio essay incorporation.

In this workshop, participants will brainstorm benefits to creating sound artifacts in writing classrooms. The artifacts that will be examined and discussed in this workshop include audio postcards, essays, and sound pieces as well as the “translation” work of turning text essays into sound. The session will demonstrate how these tasks are achieved in the classroom by discussing how students develop their competencies through short, sound-based narratives (“audio postcards”), focusing on such elements as voice, non-verbal sound, and interviews. Presenters will also demonstrate how, while using the creative nonfiction genre as a model, students synthesize their rhetoric, language, and technology skills by producing an original audio essay.

We will work through the process of crafting assignments, topics, and techniques to give to students. We will also, “get our hands dirty” by editing and remixing a set of provided audio files in Audacity in order to create an audio artifact. By hosting this workshop, we expect to learn along with the other participants, by sharing and reflecting on experiences in integrating sound into composition classrooms.

Presenters will also share sample student audio essays and student responses to their experiences in an audio essay course. Throughout the session, participants will be prompted to think about ways to integrate podcasts and other sound-based activities into their courses. Participants are also encouraged to bring in sample sound and/or textual essays to explore how to translate text into sound and vice versa. All levels of technical proficiency are welcome to attend.

(MW.07) Performance-Teaching, Performance-Policy: An Action-Planning Workshop for Times of Crisis

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This workshop session intends to help participants generate responsible strategies and policies for responding to hate speech and coercive behaviors, especially in policy gray areas.

Full description:

This workshop will extend perplexing conversations teacher-scholars had at the Southern Regional Composition Conference in March 2018 about our roles in managing classroom behavior violations (especially ones that involve discriminatory or morally coercive behaviors) that are not blatant. Indeed, some behaviors and speech acts may not be welcome in our classrooms, but they may not truly violate a written policy. This workshop session intends to help participants generate responsible strategies and policies for responding to hate speech and coercive behaviors, especially in gray areas of policy, in classrooms where faculty and graduate students are expected to manage a safe educational atmosphere. Recognizing the situatedness of institutions in their local contexts, this session’s activities will prompt participants to reflect on ambiguity in local policy and forethink ways of responding to controversy in order to meet our ethical and professional responsibilities while protecting our students’ rights.

Gray areas created by gaps in policy and increasingly surprising student behaviors leave us uncertain how to approach controversial situations we may find ourselves in. We are also curious as to how students’ experiences with these types of situations affect their engagement (enjoyment, attendance, participation, creativity, etc.) in classes after these experiences. As we develop an agenda for this workshop, we are guided by our commitment to ensure our classrooms are safe spaces and places where students can exchange ideas freely. Some lingering question for us, then, are what are the responsibilities of teachers in protecting these safe spaces? What are the rights of our students to free speech? What spaces and places are our responsibility? What can program administrators, writing center directors, teachers, TAs, tutors, do to promote (secure?) social justice as a prerogative? What are these stakeholders’ roles in preserving democratic ideals? How can directors and tutors maintain an atmosphere free of blatant policy violations, such as hate speech, but also of more subtle coercive behaviors, such as ridicule or offensive sarcasm, in regard to controversial opinions? Complicating these issues further is the fact that one proposer’s state has passed legislation allowing concealed carry guns on college campuses. Will that sarcasm be more harmful or intimidatingwhen there’s a possibility of a student having a gun on their hip? And open the can of worms.

As engaged and responsible citizens, participants in this workshop will develop practices or heuristics for managing controversial situations in their classrooms, programs, and institutions. We expect this discussion and activity will lead to thoughtful and pragmatic approaches to cultivating responsible students, tutors, teachers, and administrators through our collective effort.

(MW.08) Cripping Performance in the First-Year Writing Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This workshop provides several strategies and activities for supercripping the first-year composition classroom.

Full description:

We have several breaks built into this workshop because if we do not enact accessibility and crip the space, then there is no point to our workshop. With that in mind, we will require a space that leaves room for participants who may use mobility aids or who may have service animals with them. In order to provide a low-stimulation environment, a room without windows is preferred, although we can make do with a curtained room. Each introduction, save the beginning introduction to cripping and supercripping, which will be a bit longer, will be around ten minutes, followed by a 20-minute activity with discussion.

Facilitator 1 will introduce the workshop participants to the idea of cripping, as it is not widely known. Claire McKinney writes in “Cripping the Classroom: Disability as a Teaching Method in the Humanities,” that, “Cripping the classroom entails developing a political understanding of disability as a socially constructed category that focuses attention on questions of accessibility as central normative concerns for interpersonal, intellectual, and social relations” (114). For this workshop, we are amplifying the idea of cripping and engaging with the theme of CCCCs 19 by centering the activities of the workshop on the performance of supercripping the first-year writing classroom. After the introduction, Facilitator 2 will report on two ongoing “cripping” syllabi: participation policies and technology policies. Participants will then engage in an activity wherein they crip something of their choice.

Facilitator 2 will then introduce the idea of supercripping feedback. One of the most time consuming and laborious things we do as educators is providing students with personalized feedback. Yet, one of the best skills we teach students is how to review feedback and revise strategically. This portion of the workshop aims to encourage and re-kindle our love for feedback through providing a foundational praxis that takes an agile approach, as well as demonstrating how utilizing techniques and technologies can engage students, making feedback motivating and accessible. This facilitator discusses a transformational coaching approach while also exploring synchronous (in the classroom, one-on-one, conferencing technologies, greenlining markups) and asynchronous approaches (podcasts, video commenting, greenlining markups, etc.), and provides a resource list to serve a starter kit for those instructors who want to explore other kinds of approaches. After the introduction, the participants will have papers/projects provided, so that they may practice supercripping feedback.

Facilitator 3 introduces how we often perform ableist rhetoric in composition—both in our foundational works, our textbooks, and our classroom practices. James L. Cherney’s “The Rhetoric of Ableism” appeared in a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly that focused on rhetoric and disability, Cherney’s work examines the specific ways in which “rhetoric can shape the way disability is understood and (in)forms its political implications” (7) and Jay T. Dolmage’s Academic Ableism casts a wider net and examines the myriad ways in which academic structures enact ableism. For the activity, participants will be given a variety of (anonymous) works and they will identify potential ableist rhetoric in the works.
Facilitator 3 will discuss a method of supercripping via radical inclusivity. She will introduce how Nel Nodding’s ethics of care helps serves as a model for increasing empathy in the classroom. Kristie Fleckenstein’s work Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching argues that “it [empathy] provides a starting point for transformation. Empathy enables not only the sharing of situations and perspectives, but also the changing of situations and perspectives. It is an agent of transformation” (101). Using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narrative (DALN) provides entry points for building empathy because there are literacy narratives about virtually every issue we face as humans—students can find a narrative that matches an issue they care about, which serves as fulcrum upon which students can become empathetic with the performer in the narrative. The focus then expands outward as student share their entry points with other members of the class, who then also build empathy for the performers. The activity for this section entails the participants finding narratives that interest them, watching/reading/listening to the narrative, and then writing about how these narratives change awareness and build empathy. The participants will be given example assignments, so that they can modify or use the practice in their classrooms.

Finally, Facilitator 2 will discuss User Experience (UX) and how to supercrip audience analysis pedagogy. By including UX methods, we foster better approaches to recognizing, understanding, and navigating difference. Audience remains the primary reason for producing communication, yet audience is substantially undertheorized, especially in terms of practical resources and steps to analysis, treating audience as cursory. Additionally, audience analysis is rarely approached in terms of accessibility. User Experience (UX) methods provide an approach to teaching audience analysis practically that provides concrete and actionable strategies increasing audience awareness, valuing the audience’s rhetorical and cultural context (St. Amant, 2017) thereby engendering “cultural humility” and sensitivity (Sun and Getto, 2017, p. 91). For the activity, participants will be view/listen to examples of clipping, captioning, and examining television and film to engage in accessible thinking.

(MW.09) Creating a Performative Syllabus Using “You-Attitude”

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Speakers will provide tools for writing and presenting syllabi that are more active, inclusive, and memorable to better mirror the pedagogy of our classrooms.

Full description:

Syllabi represent an important contact point between instructors and students; these documents shape first impressions of our courses and indicate our pedagogical approach. Therefore, they are a logical place to begin a discussion of the performative nature of the processes and pedagogies we value in the classroom.
Important scholarship on the work of the syllabus has discussed using Universal Design (Passman & Green 2009, Womack 2017), the “Promising” Syllabus” (Bain 2004), challenges in EFL/ESL contexts (Tabari 2013), and applications for reflection and assessment (Roberts 2013). This workshop builds from these non-traditional views of syllabi but asks participants to see the syllabus not as a static document but as performance rhetoric.
Studies of syllabi in writing courses suggest it is much more than content that matters. The language choice and tone in syllabi can affect how students perceive both themselves and the instructor (Román-Pérez, 2007 & Bowers-Campbell, 2015). Therefore, syllabi are powerful. Because of the complex position of the syllabus as a document, situated between the instructor and student, reflective of the institution and discipline, and constituting both product and process of the course, syllabi are also constrained (Afros & Schyer 2009). Looking at the syllabus as performance rhetoric instead of a static document creates space for challenging these constraints and creating documents that reflect a class and pedagogy dedicated to meeting student needs in terms of language, design, and modality. Therefore, speakers will discuss best practices in syllabi production as well as tenets of “You-Attitude” from business writing to provide participants with practical ways to reshape their syllabi documents to more performative, that is, more active, engaging, and non-traditional. In so doing we can create syllabi that are not only more accessible and inclusive to the needs of diverse learners but also more engaging.
Attendees will evaluate sample syllabi and compare/contrast language/design choices. They will also be encouraged to perform/share their own sample documents for feedback. Speakers will provide creative ideas for presenting syllabi in non-traditional ways and will discuss how the “Power of Moments” can be used to make course presentations of syllabi more memorable (Heath & Heath 2017). Ultimately, participants will gain tools to create course documents that model the inclusive and engaging pedagogy we perform in our classrooms.
Schedule & Activities:
The workshop is divided into three segments: 1) introduction of core principles of the workshop, including best practices in document design, “You-Attitude,” and creating “moments,” 2) practice with core principles introduced, 3) application of workshop principles in the participants’ own teaching contexts. Opportunities for participant engagement are included in and increase with each segment. The first segment asks participants to share their thoughts and experiences on various introductory prompts about syllabi and includes participants in interactive presentation and discussion of key concepts; the second segment encourages participants to engage workshop concepts in more depth through presenter-facilitated activities within break-out groups and in reflection on the findings shared with the whole group; the third segment provides individual and small group innovation and sharing stations for participants to choose from according to their own needs and interests as they begin to apply and experiment with workshop concepts in their own syllabi. Time is allotted for a short break between segments as well as reflection in the end on what participants are carrying from the workshop, with attention to ideas for syllabus revision and sustaining momentum for syllabus reconsideration in the future.
9-9:20: Introductions: A brief overview of activities will be introduced. Presenters 1 and 2 will facilitate group activities related to experiences and understandings of the syllabus as a document in order to establish a framework for workshop activities and outcomes.
9:20-10:20: Interactive Presentation of Core Principles with Examples: Presenter 1 will present an overview of “You-Attitude,” highlighting its 5 basic principles. Presenter 1 will answer common questions about “You Attitude,” provide specific examples of how it can be applied to syllabus creation, and link it to important discussions of best practices in syllabi creation, such as Bain’s “Promising Syllabus” (2014) and Womack’s “Teaching is Accommodation” (2017), among others.
Presenter 1 will show participants small sections of syllabi to discuss as a large group. Participants will be asked to read samples as a student would to infer the effects of certain types of language and design choices. Participants will be asked to discuss how the samples could be improved based on tenets provided so far in the workshop.
Presenter 2 will discuss performance rhetoric and the “Power of Moments” and accompanying strategies (Heath & Heath 2017). Presenter 2 will lead an interactive discussion on ways in which this philosophy can be applied to make meaningful and memorable presentations and course documents.
10:20-10:30: Break
10:30-11:20: Practicing with Core Principles: Presenters will provide syllabus samples (or participants may share their own) and participants will be given specific prompts to perform the pieces as instructor/student pairs. The participants will follow the “think, pair, share” method for discussion. Presenter 1 and 2 will circulate among the groups to help aid discussion and answer questions. Presenters will ask for “think, pair, share” groups to reflect upon their discussions and report back to the large group.
11:20-11:30 Break
11:30-12:10: Application/Performance of Core Principles: Presenters 1 and 2 will provide several stations that participants can visit to experiment with new strategies, practice innovative presentations, and brainstorm/share innovations related to their own course materials.
12:10-12:30: Wrap up, final reflections, next steps, and questions. Presenter 1 will discuss practical strategies towards ongoing syllabus revision and reconsideration (Lang 2006, Roberts 2013). Presenter 2 will facilitate reflections and wrap-up.
Meeting day and space requirements:
We could complete this workshop as a Wednesday morning or afternoon workshop. We could also do this workshop Saturday afternoon. We would need a projector for notes and examples that is able to hook up to a computer or is already hooked to computer. Small tables (preferably round) would be nice for group activities.

(MW.10) Co-Performing and Transforming the Labor of Feedback

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Informed by a question-based pedagogy that promotes writerly agency by teaching students to solicit feedback, participants revise their syllabi and practice/perform six classroom activities.

Full description:

The prevailing pedagogical roles in the feedback process usually break down in this way: I, the instructor, perform the role of omniscient director telling students what to do, and students perform the role of novice actor, incorporating my authoritative, privileged voice and advice. But, what if performing composition privileged a different role for both the student and instructor, creating a student-centered space where students initiate a dialogue for feedback? Performance composition means that students take a director’s role in the feedback process, allowing us as instructors to hear our students’ individual, diverse voices and creating a space for students to request and receive the feedback they need.

We have developed a pedagogy teaching students how to develop their directors’ roles. Students learn how to solicit feedback about their writing that actively engages them in revision. With this model, the charge to “Get feedback” becomes a dialogue, not a command. In so doing, the performance of feedback rhetoric, in the words of Andrea Lunsford, “gets up off the page and marches out” and off the margins of students’ papers into deep revision.

At last year’s conference in Kansas City, we presented our question-based pedagogy research and practice to an engaged audience from a range of institutions and institutional types, and they asked for more. In response to their clear request, we propose a workshop that will enable instructors to perform this pedagogy in partnership with their students.

We came to this project by asking the following question–How can inquiry-based learning be applied to the writing classroom? Most inquiry-based research is in scientific disciplines (Edelson, 1999), and existing writing research on feedback focuses on the instructor to writer exchange. Almost no research provides pedagogical help aiding student-initiated feedback. What does exist only encourages students to “[g]et feedback” but does not say how (Formo and Stallings, 2014). Thus, we began an innovative pedagogy research project in an effort to fill these gaps.

We created a pilot program that teaches students how to solicit feedback about their writing. In our question-based courses, students must ask 1-3 questions for feedback about their early and final drafts. Students, then, reflect on the responses to their questions throughout the semester. Using grounded theory, we analyzed 162 end-of-semester reflection essays in which students analyzed the questions they asked about their writing, the feedback they received, and their overall experience in the process. Our findings suggest students
1. Improve their ability to ask questions about their writing
2. Incorporate feedback from both peers and instructors
3. Transfer their question-asking from this course to others (self-reported)
Taken together, the findings suggest that this question-based pedagogy promotes investment in performative dialogue between writers and readers which in turn engenders writerly agency.

This workshop actively engages participants in a series of activities that invites them to think pedagogically and metacognitively about the feedback they provide the writers in their classrooms and the ways in which they teach writers to solicit feedback about their writing. Together the workshop facilitators and participants will perform question-based pedagogy.

Half-day workshop schedule:
1:00 pm: Speaker 1 asks participants to provide feedback on a student essay as they normally would. Then, Speaker 1 facilitates a large group discussion about the feedback participants provide on the student’s essay.
1:20 pm: Speaker 2 presents our project’s genesis, including an interactive “useful/useless feedback” exercise that nods to the research on feedback. She then contextualizes the need for question-based pedagogy
1:40 pm: Speakers 1, 3, and 4 provides a brief presentation of this question-based research project.
2:00 pm: The speakers facilitate a large-group discussion to field any questions.
2:05 pm: Speaker 3 asks participants to go back to the student essay from the beginning of the workshop. Then, participants answer the student’s questions about his or her essay. Participants conduct question-based feedback. Speaker 3 follows this activity with a large-group discussion.
2:20 pm: Speaker 4 walks participants through a guided syllabus revision activity. Speaker 4 explains how to revise a syllabus so that it reflects a question-based pedagogy.
2:45 pm: Speaker 3 walks participants through a question-based thesis workshop. Participants perform the workshop as if they were students.
3:10 pm: Speaker 1 facilitates a question-based online paragraph workshop. Participants perform the workshop as if they were students.
3:35 pm: Speaker 4 facilitates a question-based classroom activity where participants formulate critical thinking questions about a text.
4:00 pm: Speaker 3 elaborates on the Question Log and Reflection assignment and participants modify the assignment to integrate it into their courses.
4:20 pm: This activity happens behind the scenes of the workshop. Speaker 2 will gather questions the participants ask during each activity. The speaker records participants’ questions in a Google Doc in order to illustrate the types of question banks students generate in the speakers’ courses.
Through these six activities, participants learn how to transfer this question-based pedagogy into their own classrooms.
4:40 pm: Q and A

At the conclusion of this half-day workshop, participants will have revised one of his or her writing course syllabi informed by a question-based pedagogy. They will have also engaged in six activities that they can include in their own question-based pedagogy courses. This workshop acts as a rehearsal for the question-based pedagogies they may choose to perform in their own classrooms.

(MW.11) Beyond Grammar Hacks: Resources for Play and Performance

Sponsored by: The Linguistics, Language, and Writing Standing Group

Level: 4-year

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Introduces the grammar knowledge and practices that help writers perform their voices in specific rhetorical situations.

Full description:

The study and practice of grammar includes learning about and manipulating the resources in language for creating meaning in specific rhetorical situations. Building on work in linguistics this workshop presents concrete, practical classroom activities that offer participants key concepts and activities for incorporating grammar awareness and practice in the writing classroom.

Wednesday, 9:00 am–12:30 pm
Schedule
9:00 Welcome, introduction, logistics (10 mins)
9:10 Speakers 1 and 2 (5 mins)
9:15 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
9:55 Short break
10:00 Speakers 3 and 4 (5 mins)
10:05 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
10:45 Long break
10:55 Speakers 5 and 6 (5 mins)
11:00 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
11:40 Short break
11:35 Speakers 7 and 8 (5 mins)
11:40 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
12:20 Whole group reflection and conclusion

Speaker 1. “Performative Grammar”: Grammar gives us choices in how to express ourselves, and this brings risks and opportunities. This workshop considers the risks and opportunities we face in expressing disagreement, and demonstrates how the grammar of negation is a resource to negotiate those challenges. Exercises will highlight the ways that uses of negation have consequences not just for the logic of an argument, but also for things like tone, tempo, and writerly ethos.

Speaker 2. “Tools, Not Rules: Grammatical Choices, Performative Effects”: Not only do writers construct and perform sentences, readers also construct and perform readings of those sentences. The intonational rhythms in the reader’s mind, which provide focus and meaning, begin with the writer’s sentences. In this workshop, participants will explore ways to help students see their sentences as grammatical constructions and intentional performances with an audience. We’ll develop practical ways to equip students with the vocabulary of grammar and an awareness of the rhetorical context of certain rules, and to help them see grammar as a set of tools that we can name, describe, and use to perform intentional sentences.

Speaker 3. “Other People’s Grammar”: Speaker 3 invites participants to consider the writing classroom as a contact zone for dialogue about diversity in grammar. Examples from the Code-Meshing Pedagogy website (dslab.lib.rochester.edu/code-meshing) will be used to model such a discussion. How do the examples reveal ways in which grammar performs and effects actions? What role does the audience play? Participants will then explore how, depending on the demographics of their classes, code-meshing might be employed in course materials or writing projects to heighten student awareness of and appreciation for multiplicity and social equity in grammar (Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy; Royster; Gees).

Speaker 4. “Playing with and Performing Punctuation”: Speaker 4 will demonstrate a playful, performance-based pedagogy for punctuation. Participants will be asked to perform, using their voices, different ways of punctuating a text, along with the contexts that make those punctuation choices meaningful. We’ll play with both “straightforward” and “wild and crazy” ways of punctuating various texts, each time asking: “Can we make this mean something? And what’s the context in which this punctuation can make this meaning?” By using this approach in our own classrooms, we create opportunities to discuss not just grammar, but the myriad ways in which meanings are created in context.

Speaker 5. “The Sentence Act”: By its nature, the sentence performs its meaning for the reader. Wonderfully flexible–with its intrusive interruptions (or whispered asides)—the sentence invites the writer to play with rhythm and stress, to create meaning through voice. Through such play, the text becomes a vocal performance, something heard and felt by the reader (Elbow). In this workshop, participants will learn about and experiment with end-focus (Halliday), sentence flexibility, and parentheticals (Palacas) as ways to connect meaning and voice in writing. Participants will experience the sentence as a resource for performing meaning and leave with activities that they can bring into their own classrooms.

Speaker 6. “Constructing Paragraphs Inside Out”: Illustrating the use of Cognitive Construction Grammar, speaker 6 shows how linguistic attention can aid larger argumentative goals. For example, the construction [by X, I mean Y] redefines a shared concept (X) using a narrower meaning (Y) imposed by the writer. Other constructions include [It’s like X], a simile construction, and [While X, nevertheless Y], a counterargument construction. For any of these constructions to work, writers have to build specific kinds of content before and after their usages, making them ideal tools for building paragraphs for different purposes. Audience members are encouraged to develop their own paragraphs using these constructions.

Speaker 7. “Revealing our Tacit Knowledge of Grammar”: Participants will perform the role of actively engaged students who demonstrate their tacit knowledge of grammar with guidance from an instructor (the presenter). Using meaning and our everyday experience, we will connect the syntactic fluency we share with the terminology we need to discuss ways to play around with our sentences to achieve different effects. During this process, we will identify and resolve ambiguity, consider rhetorical and stylistic factors, and examine options for sentence-level punctuation. Note: Sentence-level units (which need not be sentences) are preferred here to avoid problems with lexical ambiguity.

Speaker 8. “Extending Grammar-Power through Chekhovian Technique”: Speaker 8 focuses on the benefits of teaching grammar-power through stylistic imitation in the context of crafting a moving short story. Following the speaker’s analysis of a specific Chekhovian technique, participants will examine student efforts (both early drafts and revisions), learn about revision exercises informed by grammatical theory, and discuss ways of adapting imitation assignments to their own teaching contexts. Among other things, the choice of author to imitate is not a negligible matter; one of Chekhov’s main themes being how human communication works and how it breaks down, his stories are an apt choice for a communication classroom.

(MW.12) The Art of Performing “This is Fine”: Addressing the Impact of Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on Students, Teachers, and Programs

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop will provide theoretical and practical approaches for incorporating trauma-informed practices in the writing classroom.

Full description:

Despite the challenges and limitations we face as non-mental health professionals, first-year composition teachers often bear witness to troublesome mental or behavioral health issues. Regardless of their own personal comfort level in dealing with the messy realities of their students’ lives, there is much that a caring educator can do to support students as they manage their mental health in the college classroom. This workshop will coach participants in developing such approaches for their unique classrooms, programs, and campuses using trauma-informed practices and structures that employ the central tenets of this emerging field.

Students today are often are anxious, agitated, and seemingly fragile in ways folks love to debate (see, for instance, “Why Are Today’s College Students So Emotionally Fragile?” and Yahoo columnist Liz Goodwin’s April 2015 feature article on Tulane University’s emerging mental health crisis for examples). As Universities worldwide start to raise awareness about student mental health (see the U.K.’s #stepchange campaign aimed at universities “adopting mental health as a strategic imperative”), many instructors in the U.S. are worried about their students and about themselves; they are overwhelmed and underprepared when hearing trauma narratives, drying office hour tears, or from wondering why only four students can make it through an entire semester of composition even after they’ve softened just about every policy, deadline, and conversation they ethically can.

In Mad At School, Margaret Price describes the “theoretical and material schism” between mental disability and the academy. “Academic discourse operates not just to omit, but to abhor mental disabilityadversity and all–to our institutions every day. Writing teachers, in particular, see the impact of the toll of performing “this is fine,” like the popular meme dog sipping coffee in the middle of a burning inferno, nearly every day. Given intense pressures to “perform well,” the quiet and pervasive effects of adverse childhood experiences and trauma not only go unnoticed but are perhaps inflamed by the academy’s valuation of reason.

This proposed workshop seeks to counter tendencies in the academy to willfully ignore, deny, or minimize the impact of ACEs and trauma on our students, our institutions, and on ourselves. While innovating trauma-informed approaches to pedagogies, curriculum, and program design using a range of interdisciplinary theories from mindfulness studies to neurobiology, we reject tropes that cast the problem as a “touchy-feely” approach to the writing classroom. We see performances of “this is fine” as symptomatic of the pressures placed on people and programs to rationalize these problems as more appropriate for a clinical context.

We take action on this issue by helping participants better understand the mental health needs of their students. Specifically, this workshop will introduce attendees to the emerging concept of trauma-informed practice–a social service approach that seeks to account for and assist individuals who are dealing with the aftereffects of trauma. These aftereffects, according to neuroscientist Bruce Perry, can include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, such as dissociative reactions (appearing “out of it”), aggression, absenteeism, and trouble meeting deadlines. However, even reactions that don’t meet diagnosable PTSD criteria impact learning significantly. Perry notes that such learners are often, at baseline, farther along the fight-or-flight continuum than their non-traumatized peers, making it more difficult for them to commit information to long term memory or effectively process sensory information.

Workshop participants will gain a general understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science and research; clinical definitions of trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); and information about vicarious traumatization. More specifically, the workshop will focus on how individual instructors and writing programs at a variety of institutions can draw on research and an emerging set of guidelines to develop their own institution- and classroom-specific models for implementing trauma-informed education.

Because writing programs are only now becoming aware of ACEs research and Trauma Informed (TI) approaches, we will also provide an overview of what TI-aware organizations look like in clinical contexts, and the implications of clinical contexts for writing classrooms.

The workshop will include:

–An overview of the extant research on ACEs, trauma, and college student populations;
–Clinical definitions of trauma, trauma-informed, and PTSD;
Information about vicarious traumatization;
–Intersectional identities and ACEs science, addressing awareness of ACEs in terms of raced, classed, gendered, [dis]abled, and “othered” bodies;
–Understanding your limitations as a non-mental health professional; and
–Sharing specific challenging classroom and campus scenarios, and brainstorming potential TI approaches to address these scenarios.

Additionally, participants will engage in at least four activities:

Activity One: Use what you’ve learned about ACEs science and trauma-informed approaches to analyze the “Habits of Mind” document. Ask yourself: Are any of these approaches potential barriers? Which approaches might already be “trauma-informed?”

Activity Two: Identify rhet/comp/WPA theories, practices, and pedagogies you believe are (perhaps without stating it) already trauma-aware. What makes them so?

Activity Three: Thinking of ACEs and TI-approaches to designing rhet/comp programs and/or courses might be understood as a matter of universal design. Redesign your first-year composition course as a mash-up experience of UD principles and TI-approaches. What has changed? What has stayed the same?

Activity Four: How can your assignment design and assessment practices use TI approaches to create a classroom space that holds compassion at its center and allows students to participate from a variety of perspectives? Please note, this does not mean developing trauma-focused assignments.

These activities will offer participants opportunities to adapt TI-aware approaches to educational systems, writing programs, and their classrooms.

(MW.13) Soundwriting in the Composition Classroom: Why and How

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Come make some noise with us! Create aural representations. Explore how and why soundwriting (re)invigorates writing classrooms and increases access.

Full description:

Sound is getting more and more attention in rhetoric and composition. Scholars in our field have recently documented a “growing body of scholarship on digital and sonic rhetoric” (Rodrigue et al., 2016) that has created “an emergent scholarly community in rhetoric and sound studies” (Stone, 2015). They note such work is “a complement to the field’s interests in visual rhetorics and multimodal composition” (Hocks & Comstock, 2017), in large part because work in digital and sonic rhetoric is committed to both “thorough explorations of sonic rhetorical strategies and a presentation of a new digital pedagogical approach” (Rodrigue et al., 2016). This workshop invites participants to understand why work in sound fits so well with what we do and how to compose and teach with digital audio.

We know that performance is inherent in all rhetorical acts, but we sometimes forget that audio is a modality that shines a spotlight on the performative aspects of rhetorical communication, for students and teachers alike. When we soundwrite, we can hear what we cannot readily see. Writing becomes not just a series of assignments students complete for the teacher-audience-of-one, but rather rhetorical performances that students plan, perform, produce, and publish for audiences well beyond the classroom. In many cases, students assume new voices and roles as they experiment with the rhetorical flourishes and identity-play especially suited to the sonic mode.

Though it may seem that this workshop requires hearing, we welcome participants who do not hear or see and faculty who anticipate teaching students for whom audio and photographic content are unavailable. The workshop will directly address accessibilities for a variety of learners.

In this workshop, participants will join our growing community of sound scholars who teach students to compose with audio through a series of hands-on activities that will include: understanding the affordances of sound and the constraints of the aural mode, guided sound-editing, discussion of best practices for teaching audio, consideration of the value of sound for teachers and students who do not hear, and reflection on the value of soundwriting for the writing classroom.

Throughout the morning, we will be guided by and return to five questions:

Why try a given writing activity in audio?
Why use sound to teach writing and rhetoric?
What are the best practices for teaching with audio?
Where can teachers and students find audio assets for soundwriting?
How can we develop and improve audio-editing skills with Audacity?

The workshop facilitators are all editors or authors of a forthcoming volume of new work on the theory and praxis of soundwriting instruction. In their own writing classrooms, these facilitators regularly integrate soundwriting, and they are thus teacher-scholars fully immersed in the “why” and “how” of bringing audio into writing instruction.

In preparation for the workshop, participants should do the following:

1. Download the free audio editing software Audacity and the LAME MP3 encoder (Audacity will give instructions on how to do so) onto your personal computer.

2. Bring this computer with you to the workshop, along with headphones.

3. Also bring a personal photograph (or have one easily accessible) for a sonic activity.

Workshop Schedule Overview

9:00 – 9:20 am
Introduction to the Value of Audio in Rhetoric and Writing Classrooms
Definitions and Examples of “Affordances” and “Constraints”
Introductions, Goals and Experiences We Bring to the Workshop

In addition to offering participants an introduction to sonic rhetoric and writing, we want to expand the community of soundwriting teachers by giving time for participants to share how they currently use sound in their writing classrooms and/or their soundwriting pedagogy aspirations.

9:20 – 9:30 am
Workshop Overview: Sonic Activity & Examples

Facilitators will describe the workshop agenda and goals and introduce the activity participants will engage in. The activity calls for participants to compose an alphabetic description of a photograph, then translate that description into soundwriting that uses music, voice, and sound effects. The facilitators will share a few examples to provide insight into the potentials of the activity.

9:30 – 9:45 am
Alphabetic Translation of a Visual Artifact (Photograph)

Drawing on all five senses, create an alphabetic representation of this photograph. Use as much detail as possible.

9:45 – 10:30 am
Audio Editing Skills Introduction and Guided Practice

Facilitators will circulate as participants experiment with Audacity (audio editing software). Please note that the workshop does not presume knowledge of the software; we will accommodate participants at many levels of audio editing experience. Our goal is to show how accessible this program is for students and teachers alike and to share some of our favorite tricks and features.

10:30 – 10:45 am
Finding and Ripping Audio Assets

We will share our favorite strategies for finding assets and including them in soundwriting. We will also address best practices for the ethical use of others’ creative work.

10:45 am – 12:00 pm
Create a Sonic Representation of a Visual Image

This time is for guided “making” and “creating.” While participants work on their own computers, facilitators will circulate, offering advice, answering questions, and sharing insights.

12:00-12:10 pm
Alphabetic Reflection on Sonic Activity

Participants will write for ten minutes responding to these questions: What did this activity teach you about the affordances and constraints of sound? What kinds of insights, questions, or challenges emerged as you created your sonic representation? What did this activity teach you about what you need to do to support your students in composing with sound?

12:10 – 12:30 pm
Share and Discuss

Facilitators will invite participants to present their reflections and will facilitate a larger discussion about sonic rhetoric in the classroom.

Ultimately, soundwriting opens new space for bringing the creativity and unpredictability of student work, student identity, and student performance into the writing classroom. Join us for a morning of teaching and learning together.

FORUM–Individual Issues

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FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty is a peer-reviewed publication concerning working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty in college composition and communication. It is published twice annually (alternately in CCC and TETYC) and is sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Faculty and scholars from all academic positions are welcome to contribute.

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Volume 8, Number 2

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Volume 7, Number 2

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Volume 6, Number 2

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Volume 5 Number 2

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Volume 5, Number 1

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Volume 4, Number 1

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Volume 3, Number 2

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Volume 3, Number 1

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Volume 2, Number 2

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Volume 2, Number 1

Winter 1998
Volume 1, Number 1

Call for FORUM Manuscripts: Contingent Faculty Activism

Submission deadline: January 17, 2020
Note: Submissions will not be returned.

The editor of FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty seeks articles exploring contingent faculty activism.

Nationwide, we have seen a surge of activism in response to the continued corporatization of education–high school teachers walking out in Virginia and California, graduate students unionizing, and adjunct faculty organizing in Florida and North Carolina. This special issue is inspired by this latest surge in action. Composition and English studies has significant scholarship dedicated to documenting and theorizing labor problems and conditions. This special issue concerns what happens next.

Recent anthologies like Composition in the Age of Austerity (2016), Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor & Action in English Composition (2017), and Labored: The State(ment) and Future Work in Composition (2017) do some of this work. The editorial board of Forum invites authors, especially contingent, non-tenure-track, and adjunct faculty in English studies, to contribute to this growing body of scholarship. We are interested in movements, actions, and policies small and large, concerning single departments or entire systems. Where possible, pieces should be framed by or connect to the work of writing and English department faculty.

Writers may approach the theme in a variety of ways, including but not limited to the following:

Where has contingent faculty action or activism worked, and in what contexts? What made these initiatives successful? What was learned through these successes?
Where has contingent faculty activism not worked, and in what contexts? What caused these initiatives to fail? What was learned through these failures?
How might our disciplinary knowledge in Composition, Rhetoric, and English studies best be employed in our activism?
How do geographic location, state laws, and institution type affect progress in contingent faculty activism?
What possibilities remain for contingent faculty activism in various contexts?

Due to FORUM’s space limitations, essays should be between 1,500 and 2,700 words. While authors should reference current professional/scholarly discussions, extensive literature reviews are not required. Submissions will go through peer review. For further information please contact Amy Lynch-Biniek at lynchbin@kutztown.edu.

Submit your work electronically to lynchbin@kutztown.edu. Put the words “FORUM article” in your subject line. Submissions should include the following information:

your name
your title(s)
your institution(s)
home address and phone number; institutional address(es) and phone number(s)
if applicable, venue(s) where submission was first published or presented previously

Thank you for your interest!

FORUM Editor: Amy Lynch-Biniek

FORUM Editorial Board: Natalie Dorfeld, Steve Fox, Jes Philbrook

Editorial Staff

Editor
Trace Daniels-Lerberg
trace.daniels@utah.edu

Editorial Board
Nona Brown, University of Utah
Peggy Kulesz, University of Texas at Arlington
Brian Whaley, Utah Valley University

Production Editor
Tom Tiller, NCTE

Permissions
permissions@ncte.org

Director of Publications
Colin Murcray, NCTE

FORUM Homepage

FORUM Submission Guidelines

FORUM Links

FORUM Homepage

Individual Issues

Editorial Staff

Forum welcomes you to submit essays related to the teaching, working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty. Faculty and scholars from all academic positions are welcome to contribute. Of special interest are research, analyses, and strategies grounded in local contexts, given that labor conditions and the needs of contingent faculty vary greatly with geography, institutional settings, and personal circumstances.

Essays should address theoretical and/or disciplinary debates. They will go through the standard peer review and revision process. For further information please contact the Forum production office at ttiller@ncte.org.

Submit your work electronically to Forum by emailing ttiller@ncte.org. Put the words “FORUM article” in your subject line. Submissions should include the following information:

your name
your title(s)
your institution(s)
home address and phone number; institutional address(es) and phone number(s)
if applicable, venue(s) where submission was first published or presented previously

Video Introduction to CCCC 2019

Click here to read the full call for program proposals.

(SW.01) Community Writing Mentoring Workshop

(SW.02) Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

(SW.03) Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege

(SW.04) Building and Running an Academic Journal: A Behind-the-Scenes Workshop in Independent Publishing

(SW.05) Performing Curriculum in the Classroom: Designing Teaching for Transfer (TFT) Courses for Diverse Campuses

(SW.06) Revision as REmix: Hip Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision

(SW.07) DBLAC Writing Workshop

(SW.08) “Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst

(W.01) Performing Academic Writing in the Real World: Poverty, Disability, and Cultural Contexts in Basic Writing

(W.02) Living Feminist Lives: Materialities, Methodologies, and Practices

(W.03) Plant Something: Performance-Rhetoric, Community Writing, and Food Activism

(W.04) Performing Our Lives: Creative Nonfiction and (the Art and Rhetoric of) Representation

(W.05) Remixing Performance in Games

(W.06) Lights, Camera, Action: Performance and Performing in Writing Center Origins

(W.07) Co-Exploring International Writing Research and Rehearsing Scholarly Performances

(W.08) Developing an Indigenous Scholarly Practice: An Indigenous Rhetorics Research and Writing Retreat

(W.09) Establishing a Community of Inquiry in Online Writing Courses through Student and Instructor Presence

(W.10) Performing Rhetorical Activism: Latinxs in the Community and in the Academy

(AW.01) “Grantwriting and Community Engagement Pedagogy: How to Create and Adapt a Course for Your Particular Milieu”

(AW.02) Handcrafted Rhetorics: DIY and the Public Power of Made Things

(AW.03) Bridging the Semiotic Channels: Teaching Discussion and Oral Performance in the Writing Classroom

(AW.04) Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Writing Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels and Beyond: Combating Linguistic Racism

(AW.05) Staying woke on campus: Promoting social justice for multilingual students

(AW.06) Performing Corpus Analysis: Putting Corpus Findings Into Pedagogical Practice

(AW.07) The Choreography of Collaborative Coding

(AW.08) Pedagogical Strategies for Increasing Student Self-Efficacy: Turning “No Can” into “Can Do”

(AW.10) Quilting Composition: Performing Composition Pedagogy through Critical Quilt Making

(AW.12) Teach it Like We Mean It: Helping Students Perform Their Power in Peer Review

(AW.13) Shut up and Listen!: Speaking truth to power (2-hr Ignite Talk Workshop)

(MW.01) Performing Prison: Intentional Teaching, Research, and Writing Inside & Out

(MW.02) Transforming Failure into Effective Advocacy: A Workshop on Performing Community Leadership

(MW.03) Responding to Anti-Intellectualism in the Classroom: Developing Positive Emotions and Facilitating Student Engagement

(MW.04) Engaging the Global: Performing Translingual/Transmodal Pedagogies in Writing Classrooms

(MW.05) What Happens After Kansas City?: Anti-Racist Activism in Composition

(MW.06) Podcasting in the Composition Classroom

(MW.07) Performance-Teaching, Performance-Policy: An Action-Planning Workshop for Times of Crisis

(MW.08) Cripping Performance in the First-Year Writing Classroom

(MW.09) Creating a Performative Syllabus Using “You-Attitude”

(MW.10) Co-Performing and Transforming the Labor of Feedback

(MW.11) Beyond Grammar Hacks: Resources for Play and Performance

(MW.12) The Art of Performing “This is Fine”: Addressing the Impact of Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on Students, Teachers, and Programs

(MW.13) Soundwriting in the Composition Classroom: Why and How

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